Accident investigation and learning effects within emergency organisations and across societal sectors.

This project proposal is a joint project between the universities in Stavanger, Norway and Lund, Sweden. The project proposal emphasises specific issues and judgements to be made in accident investigation, and how learning processes from the accident inve stigations are dependent of their specific societal contexts. A comparison between Norwegian and Swedish accident investigations and follow up activities is sought in order to explain the significance of contributing factors in the learning processes of t he two countries. The project will test the main hypothesis that accident investigations play an insignificant role in the learning at individual, organizational and cross sectoral levels in society. This hypothesis presupposes 4 sub-hypotheses: The learn ing perspective of accident investigation is poorly founded. The learning effects are minor, especially for actors not directly involved in the accident. Accident investigation reports only infer changes and learning when governments instruct changes to r egulations. Accident investigation results are often fronted in political populist cases, which usually fall to the ground without long term results. The performance of the rescue and combat resources are seldom evaluated in accident investigations, and t hus there is no tradition for criticism of the external (often public) emergency management which influences learning besides those directly involved. The project consist of three workpackages, which mirrors the three primary aims of the project: a deduct ion of a analytic framework for assessing learning effects from accident investigation (WP1), a comparison of Norwegian and Swedish approaches and related effects on learning based on two cases in each country (WP2), an in depth study of Norwegian emergen cy management organisations' learning processes (WP3).