European Journal for Security Research - Special Issue Call for Papers: New Directions in the Evaluation of Civil Protection Exercises
Guest Editors: Sandra Pfister1, Christian Resch1, Hannes Kern1, Bernhard Bürger2, Harri Ruoslahti3
Civil protection exercises are considered a cornerstone of increasing preparedness to real-life-incidents. They are considered to provide a vital ground to train and validate tactics and strategies, to identify strengths and shortcomings, to stimulate exchange on best-practices, or, to put it simple: to provide an opportunity for learning and development. As elsewhere, evaluation became more and more an instrument for quality assurance, validation, accountability, or knowledge gathering in the field of civil protection exercises over the last decades. Despite being expected to meet high standards, research on exercise evaluation itself has been rare.
The Special Issue “New Directions in the Evaluation of Civil Protection Exercises” addresses the connex between exercise, evaluation, and planning. It invites contributions to the following thematic areas:
(1) Basic frameworks for evaluation. While researchers have well elaborated on various tools and methods to assist evaluators in measuring the performance during exercises, its underlying methodology and epistemology are barely addressed. We invite contributions that raise questions such as how to conceptualize and operationalize “performance” in the context of civil protection, how to integrate exercise and evaluation, and how to plan and validate the applied tools and methods for evaluation.
(2) Evaluation performance. While issues such as professionalization and professionality of evaluators, and the development of ethical standards or rules of conduct have been broadly discussed in general evaluation research, these have been barely discussed in the context of civil protection exercises. We invite contributions that address issues such as quality assurance of evaluation and professional practice.
(3) Evaluation outcomes. Finally, exercise evaluation is not self-sufficient. Rather, making a difference may be considered part of the ethos of evaluators. However, evaluation results and recommendations are not necessarily implemented in the practical field. We invite articles that deal with the implementation of findings from exercise evaluation in the practical field and future exercise evaluation, and address opportunities and barriers to achieve evaluation outcomes on the individual (e.g., acceptance of evaluation results, practitioners’ attitudes towards evaluation and evaluators) or collective level (e.g., failure culture and subcultures, etc.).
Please submit your full articles (8,000 words) by 31st August 2023 via the journal website (https://www.editorialmanager.com/ejsr/default2.aspx (this opens in a new tab)). Please prepare your manuscripts according to the guidelines of the European Journal for Security Research: https://www.springer.com/journal/41125/submission-guidelines (this opens in a new tab).
After submission, the papers undergo a double-blind peer-review and, in case of acceptance, will be published online first.
Contact: sandra.pfister@dcna.at
1 Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA), Vienna/Graz (Austria)
2 Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), Vienna (Austria)
3 LAUREA Univ. of Applied Sciences, Espoo (Finland)