Main research interests

The project Resilience Building through Multi-Stakeholder Engagement in Anticipatory Action for Climate-Induced Disasters (REBUMAA) 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 (FCDO) and Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC). CLARE is a five-year, CAD 120 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.

We are interested in understanding how organizations govern for and coordinate in unexpected situations such as crises and 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, and other humanitarian catastrophes prepare for and coordinate in such events. Organizational routines play a key role when it comes to responding rapidly and efficiently in the event of a crisis. Crises are situations that present organizations with ambiguous goals and a high degree of discontinuity, uncertainty, and surprise. The timing of critical events is often unknown in advance and time-consuming decision-making processes are not feasible in emergency situations that call 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 crisis 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 various 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 and pandemics. Such tensions originate from, for example, contradicting short- and long-term objectives, local versus global foci, and opposing social and financial logics. Paradox theory, which shifts our attention in the direction of interrelated but contradictory elements that persist over time, helps to engage with these tensions and 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 in how organizations that are involved in emergency response experience tensions and how they are actually addressed in practice. Exploring, for example, how actors shift paradoxes in space and time helps to explain why emergency responses and aid projects often fail in reaching their long-time objectives despite the actors’ awareness and best intentions. Our studies focus on large-scale, complex emergencies with a strong societal impact such as refugee crises and climate crises.