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Faculty of Law


European Governance of Health Crisis and Disaster Management

Concept, Tools and Processes

 
Co-conveners: Mark L. Flear (Queen's University Belfast) and Anniek de Ruijter (University of Amsterdam)

 

Date and time: Thursday, 6 December and Friday 7 December 
Venue: To be communicated closer to the date

 

We are pleased to invite submissions from academics, policy-experts and practitioners at any career stage, from the fields of law, public health, social science or political science or any related discipline. Please send us your abstract of up to 600 words to a.deruijter@uva.nl or m.flear@qub.ac.uk by 6 September 2018, we will expect completed drafts by 15 November 2018. Limited funding for travel and accommodation is available.

Over the past decade we have witnessed an increased readiness and growing infrastructure on the part of ‘Europe’ (EU, Council of Europe and WHO) to engage in emergency governance. Many, if not most, of the key examples centre on or implicate public health. Preparedness planning for terrorist attacks and pandemics provides perhaps the most obvious and recurrent example. But there is also the ongoing migration crisis, affecting the southern fringes of the EU in particular. Volcanic eruptions have grounded air travel for fear of lost lives from planes falling from the sky. And further back, BSE/CJD led to fears of an impact on human health as a result of farming techniques for cows. Aspects of the EU’s developing infrastructure and engagement with these issues have been touched upon within legal scholarship. However, there has been little attempt to map and unpack European governance of health crises and disaster management (EHCDM). This symposium attempts to provide the groundwork for such an enterprise and from there to contribute towards an awareness and reflection with regard to the common core norms and values that shape the mechanisms that underpin future responses to emergencies in Europe. The symposium does this by asking its participants to consider the norms and values embedded within the concepts, tools and processes of EHCDM and to reflect on how and to what extent these represent a distinctly ‘European’ approach. Participants will speak to one of these frames.

Through attention to these frames, the symposium intends to provide a platform for exploring the key governance elements of EHCDM through several theoretical and analytical approaches, while highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary analyses. Participants will provide a conceptual history of EHCDM, shedding light on how key regulatory and administrative tools have developed against the backdrop of scientific and social-political change, and how they have been utilized in practice. A focus on these elements also attends to the social, historical and political situatedness of EHCDM, making clear the need to develop new approaches that can adapt to developments in scientific-technical knowledge and society. The intention is to publish contributions from the symposium in a peer-reviewed edited collection or in a special issue for a high-impact journal with a leading publisher.
 

 

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The Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance is a research centre at the University of Amsterdam dedicated to the research of European Union Law in the context of the surrounding legal and political systems and wider structures of (global) governance