As the uncertainties and frequency of disasters grow, disaster risk management relies on a wider set of public and private partners, encompassing federal, state, and local levels of government, as well as businesses, voluntary organizations and citizens. A range of questions about coordination strategies, systems, practices and attitudes arise at this juncture: ‘Are emergency managers trained to work with these new actors? How committed are they to seeking new partners to assist in disaster planning and response? What policy guidance do they need? How prepared are they to work within broader partnerships? How familiar and comfortable are they with the different norms, cultures, and interests involved? Do their agencies have the budget, background, and training to involve these groups on an ongoing basis? How will decisions be made, and by whom? (see McGuire et al 2010)

Collaborative governance is often oriented towards consensus (Ansell and Gash 2007). However, consensus can be difficult in such a setting, and, in fact, it can often be undesirable. Decision making for disaster risk management needs to accommodate the possibility to negotiate different interests and forms of knowledge. Governance processes need to ‘create a space in which different interests and knowledges can be negotiated, contestation is possible, power relations are being put into question and no victory can be final’ (Mouffe in DiSalvo 2010). This requires accepting that conflicting views may be inherent to the process of good disaster risk management, conflicts that can be exacerbated by cross-border collaboration (see Storni 2013).

In her review of democratic risk governance, Jasanoff argues that command and control attempts at ‘disciplining the incalculable through sophisticated forms of calculation’ enact ill-advised hubris (2010), and she argues for a shift from disaster risk management to democratic risk governance. This does not mean abandoning command and control. Instead, Jasanoff envisages engagement of different actors as complementary to formal efforts and shows that risk governance requires not only expert professionalism and broad-based engagement with local knowledge, but also an understanding of how vulnerability and resilience reflect and enact political choices that affect individuals and communities unequally (for further discussion, see Büscher et al 2017, in press).

Examples

Decisions between Public-Private Partnerships: Chen et al (2013) show that in public-private contractual partnerships for critical infrastructure, challenges to decision making often arise because of high degrees of uncertainty and the different types of discretion provided to different organisations. This means that contracts, that explain specific roles within collaborations, are often incomplete and potentially involve frequent renegotiations, posing challenges for maintaining an authoritative decision-making structure as well as for the necessary disclosure of information within collaborative information management systems. These interactions create high risks of opportunism and transaction costs (e.g., monitoring, enforcement and conflict resolution) which could also affect the aims and decisions made. Joint ventures with diverse stakeholders require high levels of trust and awareness of each other’s goals, where information sharing may sometimes need to be very carefully calibrated and contested and may require long-term relationship building and incentive structures that align the interests of public and private collaborators.

Long-term effects: Fortun’s study of the mismanagement of risk in the city of Bhopal (2011) illustrates the value of more flexible epistemological and moral technologies. In the aftermath of the disaster at the Union Carbide India Limited company, it was not enough to consider the risk of harmful chemicals on the basis of individual substances affecting individual human bodies at a particular point in time. Interactions between multiple substances and long-term interdependencies had to be taken into account, and the evaluation of risk and damage changed over time. The deliberative learning, potentially enabled by a collaborative information management system, allows a focus on the unequal distribution of risk and enables collective reflection and evaluation of explanations and approaches, a different form of decision making than is possible in a top-down authoritative system (Jasanoff 2003). Deliberative learning brings to the table a form of ‘social learning where the knowledge of the expert and that of concerned laypeople do not mutually exclude one another’, a framework for interaction that resonates with the debates about the need to support contestation (Storni 2013).

Resources

Ansell, C., and Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice. Journal of public administration research and theory, 18(4): 543-571 [DOI] [Link]

Büscher, M., Kerasidou, X., Petersen, K. and R. Oliphant (2017 in press). ‘Networked Urbanism and Disaster’, in Freudendal-Petersen, M. and Kesselring, S. (Eds). Networked Urban Mobilities. Springer.

Chen, J., Chen, T. H. Y., Vertinsky, I., Yumagulova, L., and Park, C. (2013). Public-Private Partnerships for the Development of Disaster Resilient Communities. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 21(3): 130–143 [DOI]

Debreceny, R. S. (2013). Research on IT Governance, Risk, and Value: Challenges and Opportunities. Journal of Information Systems, 27(1):129-35. [DOI] [Link]

DiSalvo, C. (2010) Design, democracy and agonistic pluralism. Proceedings of the Research Design Society Conference, Montreal, 6 [Link]

Fortun, K. (2011). Remembering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2(2): 187–198 [DOI]

Hartman, C. and S. G. D. (2006). There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Katrina. New York: Routledge. ISO/IEC 38500:2015 [Link]

Jasanoff, S. (2003) Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science. Minerva 41(3): 223–244 [DOI] [Link]

Jasanoff, S. (2010) Beyond Calculation: A Democratic Response to Risk. In G. Lakoff (Ed.), Disaster and the Politics of Intervention, (pp.14–41). New York: Columbia University Press [DOI]

Klinenberg, E. (2002). Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

McGuire, M. Brudney, J. L. and Gazley, B. (2010). The “New Emergency Management”: Applying the Lessons of Collaborative Governance to Twenty-First-Century Emergency Planning. In T. R. O’Leary, D. Van Slyke, & S. Kim (Eds.) The Future of Public Administration around the World (pp. 117–128). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Prasad, A., Green, P. and Heales, J. (2013). On Governing Collaborative Information Technology (IT): A Relational Perspective. Journal of Information Systems, 27(1): 237-59 [DOI]

Storni, C. (2013). Design for future uses: Pluralism, fetishism and ignorance. Proceedings of the Nordic Design Research Conference 2013: Experiments in design research. Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden, June 9, 2013 – June 12, 2013. [Link]