Croatian crisis management system's response to COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of a systemic resilience model

We analyse the Croatian crisis management system's response to COVID-19 pandemic in terms of Fath, Dean, and Katzmair's [1] model of resilience in social systems. We find that the Croatian crisis management system has successfully completed one cycle of the model. However, if the system is to achieve resilience, it also needs to replace the regime from before the crisis with a new regime that will simultaneously enable a life of relative normalcy and contain an excessive spread of the virus. Strengthening social cohesion and more bottom-up, emergent leadership might facilitate the search for a new regime. Small, local outbreaks represent small-scale disturbances that provide opportunities for the development of cohesion and bottom-up leadership from local, county, municipal and city-levels to the national level. The model used in this article better conveys the underlying complexity of crisis management systems than "the hammer and the dance" model, whereas the latter is better suited for public communication. Future work should extend this case study in terms of modelling approaches, the sample of countries, and the time covered. It can also be extended to lower, sub-national, as well as higher, supra-national levels, such as the EU.