Institutionalization, legitimacy, and governance in civilian-led crisis response


Chris Giacomantonio, Dalhousie University

Utilizing publicly available documentation from new civilian-led crisis response services in Canada and elsewhere in North America, this paper examines the new organizational ‘field’ of civilian-led crisis response. Drawing on organizational and institutional theories, the paper considers the processes, structures, and pressures that are currently developing, imagines several potential futures for the field, and sets out the consequences of those different futures. Across North America, municipalities are establishing new crisis response services that are focused on mitigating crises resulting from insufficient mental health supports, homelessness and the housing crisis, and/or substance use and addictions. A central driver for the establishment of these new services has been advocacy work focused on ‘de-tasking’ the police, which inter alia promotes the removal of police from activities where a uniformed, armed responder may be ineffective or harmful. Civilian-led crisis response services remain a highly varied organizational field, with multiple different staffing, funding, and operational models in place across the continent. Several services operate in parallel with other emergency response services, with some in direct partnership with police. Other models are funded publicly but operate at arms’ length from government, for example by non-profit community health or peer support organizations. Several services have been in place for several years (and in a few cases, decades), while many others are still in pilot testing phases (see, e.g., Livingston, 2023). The governance of these services also differs alongside these organizational models, with some being managed directly by municipal or state/provincial government agencies, while others have greater autonomy and direct community involvement in decision-making. This emerging arrangement raises practical questions about how these services will navigate their relationships with police and other state and community resources, as well as normative questions regarding the basis for legitimacy of these novel institutional configurations. While these new services are intended to replace police in at least some situations, they will inevitably operate to support social order and exist in the shadow of police (state coercive) power. This means that these services will sometimes engage in ‘policing’ (sociologically speaking), which in turn raises questions regarding consent, authority, accoutability and, ultimately, legitimacy. Legitimacy, in this sense, refers to subjective judgements of a political community toward an authority’s rights to take action and make demands (e.g., Tyler, 2004; Worden and McLean, 2017). Legitimacy requires pre-existing expectations about an individual’s, or group’s, reasonable treatment by an organization or its representatives, based on broader institutionalized rules and norms about what that organization is meant to do. Once these expectations are broadly established, they create reflexive pressures on individual organizations, and other organizations in the field, to become increasingly similar to one another – a process known as ‘isomorphism’ in organizational theories (see, e.g., DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Mulone, 2022). These pressures will, in turn, circumscribe the futures available to this organizational field, and constrain – for better or worse – the kinds of expectations that political communities may have of how these services should operate. To this end, this paper reviews available evidence on the operation of civilian-led crisis response services to date, and considers the potential mechanisms through which these services may establish institutional legitimacy and related governance and accountability mechanisms. Building on organizational and institutional studies in policing (e.g., Crank, 2003; Terpstra, 2020), and acknowledging the policing role of these organizations (among other roles), the paper builds a conceptual a foundation for near-term debates as the field moves toward institutionalization.

This paper will be presented at the following session: