Mobilising knowledge for the design of crisis preparedness measures in street-level organisations

Large-scale emergencies push street-level organisations (SLOs) towards improvisation, yet we know less about how crisis experience is stabilised into preparedness. Bringing crisis-preparedness and knowledge mobilisation (KM) into dialogue, this article conceptualises preparedness as a negotiated configuration of knowledge types, KM mechanisms and sustaining infrastructures.

The article connects KM and crisis preparedness literatures, asking: (1) which knowledge types are invoked in practitioner-designed measures; (2) how co-design outputs articulate pathways from improvisation to future routines and structures; and (3) how these differ across sectoral configurations.

The analysis focuses on three sector-specific, aspirational 'good practice' documents produced in May 2023 in northern Italy through co-design workshops. Thematic analysis was conducted with a deductive codebook and inductive theme coding, with the interpretative aid of further workshop material. Transparency was enhanced through independent AI double-coding followed by human adjudication.

Across sectoral workshops, phronesis is most salient, followed by techne and episteme. Participants propose preparedness architectures centred on local crisis units and micro-territorial coordination, routinised training and exercises, and coherent synthesis and dissemination of changing rules through official channels. Between-workshop differences appear mainly in the proposed sustaining axes, KM mechanisms and robustness features.

Co-design outputs foreground practical judgement as the means through which empirical and technical inputs become actionable and ethically legitimate under ambiguity. Boundary objects tend to be relevant to practitioners insofar as co-design is explicitly structured and formalised. Frontline preparedness is narrated as value-laden and relies on KM infrastructures close to institutional and sectoral contexts.