Trust and emergency management: Experiences from the Arctic Sea region

ABSTRACT

Trust has long been identified as an essential component in different disciplines. However, trust in the context of emergency management is a less often researched phenomenon. This article intends to enrich our theoretical understanding of trust by exploring the role of interorganisational trust and the process of trust development across phases of emergency management. To achieve this, a critical case study of the cross-national Arctic Sea region is conducted. The findings reveal that in each phase of emergency management, trust has a critical role to play such as improving coordination, communication, reliability and learning. Moreover, a cross-level framework for trust development is presented in order to illustrate how each phase of emergency management contributes to process theories of trust. The article explicates how the preparation phase contributes to developing interorganisational trust. The response phase contributes significantly to developing swift interorganisational trust. Although the evaluation phase has significant potential to transform this swift and fragile trust into a more resilient interorganisational trust, this potential is underexploited due to the low priority accorded to this phase. The article elaborates on trust in the emergency context and brings the group and project level concept of swift trust to the interorganisational level of analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Interorganisational trust
• swift trust
• emergency management
• preparedness
• response
• evaluation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the paper. The authors wish to acknowledge the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nordland County Administration for their support via the MARPART project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ensieh Roud is a PhD candidate writing on emergency management in the Arctic at Business School, Nord University, Norway. Her research interests include trust, training and exercises, complexity and improvisation in emergency management context.

Anne Haugen Gausdal is a Professor in Organization, Management and Innovation at the University of South-Eastern Norway. She is also a part-time professor at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway. She earned her PhD in business economics from Bodø Business School, Nord University, Norway. Her research examines trust-building in inter-organisational contexts, the role of trust and different dimensions of trust at the inter-organisational and network level, and how trust contributes to innovation, safety and preparedness.