International Joint Operations Command Conference 2009

Collaborative Strategies for Managing Major Emergencies

International co-operation is becoming critical to successful crisis management. From international terrorism, earthquakes and flu pandemics to climate change and severe weather events, emergencies are occurring on a scale rarely seen before, and are becoming more frequent. Nations and responder agencies are increasingly working together, but more needs to be done to improve the way they prepare for, and respond to, emerging threats.

Governments and agencies recognise this. Last year’s UK National Security Strategy, for example, and the more recent CONTEST 2 counter-terrorism strategy, both stress the need for international collaboration. The International Joint Operations Command Conference provides a platform for improving such collaboration, bringing together policy makers, practitioners and academic specialists from across the world to share lessons learned and to promote best practice.

The conference runs over two days. Day one will focus on the psychology and processes of crisis leadership. Leading practitioners, academics and specialists from the emergency services and industry will define crisis management, how good crisis leaders can be identified and trained, and how lessons learned from one crisis can inform the planning and preparations for managing others.

On day two, the conference will take a more international perspective, exploring issues of regional and local ownership of crisis situations, command and control across borders, and systems for international command and control. With leading international speakers and UK practitioners with extensive experience of multi-national operations and resilience planning, the day promises to raise important issues in the future of command and control.

The International Joint Operations Command Conference is being hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in collaboration with the IJOCC Organising Committee. The beneficiary of the conference will be the VectorCommand Foundation, which is a charitable trust, funding projects that research the science behind Incident Command, publishing the results in the public domain. Lessons from the conference will also feed into and inform RUSI’s emergency management research programme.