Human-made disasters in a decentralized context: How Czech municipalities are dealing with the Ukrainian crisis

IMPACT

The article presents and reflects on empirical findings about how Czech municipalities have dealt with the Ukrainian refugee crisis. The findings come from an electronic survey conducted by the authors in co-operation with the Association of Towns and Municipalities of the Czech Republic. Complemented with the results of refugee surveys, the findings show that municipalities can deal with the crises more successfully by building/expanding collaborative relations with stakeholders. The results are particularly relevant for countries with decentralized administrative systems.

ABSTRACT

Czech municipalities have had to offer integration services to over 300,000 Ukrainian refugees. The article argues that this enormous challenge means that municipalities need to develop broader stakeholder collaborations than are currently available. Drawing on recent empirical work, the article shows that Czech municipalities face major bottlenecks becaue they have had to deal with the crisis largely on their own. The key conclusion is that the need for co-ordinated and concerted action aimed at dealing with the Ukrainian crisis has been intensified by the high degree of political decentralization which is characteristic of the Czech Republic. This article adds to the literature by analysing the response of excessively decentralized systems to human-made disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Czech Republic
• decentralization
• human-made disasters
• refugees
• stakeholder collaboration
• Ukrainian crisis

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by National Science Centre, Poland under the OPUS call in the Weave programme (Grant number: 2021/43/I/HS4/00678) and supported by GAČR Lead Agency No. 22-04324L.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.