Good governance and resilience. Sharing best practices and challenges in times of crisis across Europe

This collective volume is one of the major research outputs of the Erasmus+ project KA203 Teaching Institutional Resilience and Prompt Reaction to Crisis: Good Governance Experiences in Europe (TerraGov). The project reunites five partner universities: University of Iceland (lead partner), Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania, Faculty of Economics and Business-University of Zagreb, Croatia, Vilnius University, Lithuania and Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. The project aims to promote and foster internationalization through collaborative knowledge production at the level of both academic staff and students.

The format of this volume arose out of TerraGovʼs project concern to enhance and improve teaching experiences in the field of governance studies, by delivering up-to-date content that enables a comparative study of good governance using national case studies.

The book represents research efforts conducted by project members in the last two years, from January 2021 to December 2022 and is aimed at reflecting the diversity of experiences of cooperation between the public sector, the private sector and the civil society from a crisis perspective, with a special focus on good governance, institutional resilience, public governance, change management, multi-governance, public-private partnership, corporate social responsibility, human resource management, digitalization, sustainability, etc. In the context of the book, the topic of crisis ranges from relatively minor incidents (creeping crisis) that might escalate if not addressed, such as cases of general dissatisfaction of staff or the public related to the decision-making process within organizations, to crisis related to the COVID-19 pandemic (entailing aspects of slow-burning and crisis) (Management Library, 2022).

The editors consider that the richness of these country cases lies in the unicity of the experiences encountered at national or local level, translated into a series of lessons to be learned and good practices to be shared, as no single framework can capture the whole diversity of contextual elements and relevant parameters.