This book examines how governments respond to pressure and build resilience to crises that are increasingly complex, interconnected, and transboundary.

The last decade has underscored the limits of traditional approaches to crisis management: governments are increasingly required to balance immediate emergency response with long-term resilience, to act decisively while maintaining public trust, and to coordinate not only across sectors and institutions but also across national borders. The Baltic and Nordic countries provide a particularly revealing context for exploring these challenges. They face a shared spectrum of risks - geopolitical instability linked to Russia’s aggression, climate-related hazards, cyber threats, and the demographic and social strains of aging populations and migration. At the same time, their governments differ in how they conceptualize resilience, organize institutions, and engage with citizens. These dynamics create fruitful ground for investigating how resilience is framed, institutionalized, and practiced in public administration.

The book examines how governance under pressure operates in this region, and what lessons it offers beyond it. The chapters provide country-level studies that address how governments frame crisis and resilience in policy, the structures of government and the roles of key actors, decision-making styles and their distribution across levels, coordination mechanisms both within and across institutions, and the use of information and evidence in navigating uncertainty. Taken together, these analyses reveal both common regional challenges and distinctive national approaches, offering insight into how resilience is being constructed in practice.

B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor Emeritus of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Ivo Rollis is Researcher at Riga Stradins University, Latvia.