The Core and Periphery of Emergency Management Networks 

Abstract

Emergency planning and response increasingly involve close interactions between a diverse array of actors across fields (emergency management, public health, law enforcement, etc.); sectors (government, non-profit and for-profit); and levels of government (local, state and federal). This article assesses the temporal dynamics of emergency management networks in two moderately sized communities that have served as large-scale disaster evacuation hosting sites in the past decade. The paper uses two strategies for tracking the evolution of these networks across time. First, we develop a network roster using newspaper and newswire data sources across a decade. Second, we develop a view of the evolution of the networks by analysing emergency operations plans for each community.

Analysis of data reveals a contrast between a core set of consistent (mostly governmental) actors and a peripheral set of rapidly turning over (mostly non-governmental) actors – though the account depends on the mode of data on which one focuses. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantage presented by having a two-tier network for evacuation hosting that mixes core and periphery across multiple sectors.

Key words:

• Emergency management
• collaborative public management
• disaster policy
• evacuations

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant (award number CMMI-1143922, Brian J. Gerber, Warren S. Eller, Melanie Gall and Scott Robinson, Investigators); the authors thank the NSF for this support. All opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

1. Here membership only means co-participation in a community effort. It does not imply formal membership or acknowledgment. Given our interest in organizations that may act in the periphery of the network, a restriction to formal or self-acknowledged membership would exclude potentially interesting actors.

2. But see Robinson and Gerber (2007) and Kapucu (2007).

3. It is important to note that the resulting lists of participants are rosters and include no indications of relations between actors. This means that there can be no formal assessment of brokerage relations within the data. We return to the issue of brokerage in the conclusion.

4. Even with the combination of these two sources, measurement error is possible. The media and plan roles were confirmed individually through the context of each document to ensure that actors had a specific role in emergency management. It is possible that an actor has escaped coverage by the media or inclusion in the plans. The justification for combining modes of measurement is to reduce this measurement error through the adoption of contrasting methods by which the likely sources of error are offset. The combination of the methods, then, should provide a strong basis for inference – if, still, not a perfect one. Any roster method (surveys, interviews, field research, etc.) encounters the same issue.