Conclusions

Governments and emergency managers will probably be better prepared to face pandemic-type health emergencies in the near future thanks to the knowledge accumulated during the recent pandemic about its development and the ways different countries reacted (Kim et al. 2020; Lee et al. 2020). However, the literature on crises and disasters has demonstrated that preparedness cannot fully eliminate the difficulties and uncertainties of emergency response policies. Indeed, crises and disasters ultimately remain not only largely unpredictable, but also partly new and unsettling. As a consequence, although protocols, guidelines, well-established multi-level governance structures and expertise are important, they are not able to fully prepare people or organisations for such an event. When a crisis or a disaster occurs, emergency managers always end up having to ‘muddle through’ to a certain extent. This awareness led Robert and Lajtha (2002) to state that emergency response policies will always remain limited and ineffective as long as emergency management continues to be treated from a purely technical-managerial perspective. However, little is known about the non-technical human capabilities that help people muddle through an emergency (Roberts 2020).