Main research interests

The Resilience Building through Multi Stakeholder Engagement in Anticipatory Action for Climate Induced Disasters (REBUMAA) project aims to advance research on the forecast-based financing approach and establish best practices for future implementation. Awarded 5.8 million euros in funding, REBUMAA is a 3.5 year project taking place in Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Together with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Prof. Dr. Geiger and his team co-lead REBUMAA and have partnered with the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), Abomey Calavi University (Benin), and WASCAL (Togo) as well as the national Red Cross Societies in Nigeria, Benin and Togo.

This project is part of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE) initiative co-funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and IDRC. CLARE is a five-year, CAD120-million initiative that aims to enable inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards for people across Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.

Forecast-based financing aims to enable access to humanitarian funding for early action based on in-depth forecast information and risk analysis. Initial studies have found that it can be cost-effective compared to traditional emergency response measures and significantly increases communities’ resilience to climate change-induced disasters. Knowledge gaps in how to manage, coordinate and implement anticipatory action effectively across distinct levels of involved stakeholders have surfaced. This project will address these gaps to inform and improve future forecast-based financing.

The intended users of this research include stakeholders in Nigeria, Benin and Togo who are involved in implementing an early-action protocol, including national governments, regional and local governments, village leaders, and community members, with an emphasis on the inclusion of women. Worldwide, floods are the disasters that cause the highest number of casualties and destroy livelihoods, i.e. damage houses, ruin fields and destroy crops. By utilizing climate technology to predict when floods will occur and at what magnitude, the implementation of anticipatory action measures can prevent unnecessary loss of life and build the resilience of vulnerable communities.

For more information on the REBUMAA project, make sure to check out the official project website found here: 

CLARE
REBUMAA  
IDRC

We are interested in understanding how organizations govern for and coordinate in unexpected situations such as crises or emergencies. We study how first response organizations that carry out search and rescue operations in the aftermath of extreme events such as epidemics, earthquakes, fires or other humanitarian catastrophes, prepare for and coordinate in such events. For responding rapidly and efficiently to crises, organizational routines play a central role. Crises are situations that present organizations with ambiguous goals and a high amount of discontinuity, uncertainty, and surprise. The timing of critical events is often unknown in advance whilst time-consuming decision-making processes are not feasible in emergency situations calling for a swift response. We build on studies of routine dynamics and temporal coordination to understand how organizations coordinate multiple, highly interrelated routines in situations of crises that exhibit high degrees of temporal uncertainty. Consistent with routine dynamics research, we build on ethnographic methods of data collection to capture how routines are actually performed in the field. We therefore partner with different public, first response, and emergency organizations to carry out our research.

In this research field we study how organizations deal with complex, multilayered tensions that result from global emergencies such as climate change or pandemics. Such tensions originate for example from contradicting short- and long-term objectives, local versus global foci or opposing social and financial logics. Paradox theory, which shifts our attention towards interrelated but contradictory elements that persist over time, helps to engage with these tensions and to shed light on such nested interdependencies. In our research we specifically aim to explore how these paradoxical tensions cause unintended consequences in the long run as well as counter-productive effects on different organizational levels and scales. We are in particular interested how organizations that are involved in emergency response experience tensions and how they are actually addressed in practice. Exploring how actors for example shift paradoxes in space and time helps to explain why emergency responses and aid projects often fail in reaching their long-time objectives despite actors’ awareness and best intentions. Our studies focus on large-scale, complex emergencies with a strong societal impact such as refugee crisis or climate crisis.