My name is Michael Unterhalt. I am an engineer, a lecturer at several universities and the founder of Holistic Governance.
My path here goes through public safety. I worked for many years in fire & rescue, ambulance services and civil protection. There I learned that most hazards are no accident. They grow out of structures: responsibilities nobody takes up, rules that miss reality, and decisions whose consequences land somewhere else.
That is why today I work on the question of what good structures look like. How do we share responsibility so that it is actually carried? How do solutions become effective and affordable at the same time? And how can climate protection, economic viability and social cohesion fit into one common frame?
My path
Since 2013 I have been an independent advisor to organisations, unions and parliamentarians.
On the political level I served on the boards of the German firefighters’ professional association and the European Fire Fighters Union Alliance (EFFUA).
I contributed to German and European standardisation and led European projects on the technical side.
In 20 years of operational service with several professional fire departments I held senior roles in incident command and fire prevention. Professional exchanges took me to the USA, England, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the Emirates.
In the United Arab Emirates I led the development of a specialised rescue and firefighting vehicle. Before that I wrote my diploma thesis at Rosenbauer in Austria. It led to their new AT fire truck vehicle body.
I studied mechanical design in Germany. At Howard University and the University of Maryland I studied, among other subjects, Fire Protection Engineering and Psychology, and completed the full firefighter training at the Maryland Fire & Rescue Institute.
What follows from this
With the Public Safety Management framework (PSM) I developed an approach that reorganises a whole policy field. It reaches from the legal duty to protect through a catalogue of hazards to concrete action plans. Holistic Governance carries this way of thinking to larger questions.
Such questions are rarely solved by one person. That is why I work with an international network of experts from different disciplines.