Repertoires of Collaboration for Disaster Management: Negotiating Emergent and Dynamic Systems Success

Disasters are emergent and dynamic scenarios involving diverse stakeholders in complex decision making and as such, disaster management systems must account for these conditions. In order to more effectively design, build and adopt these systems we suggest that emergency service agencies should consider supplementing their traditional “command and control” approaches and common operating pictures (CoP), with purposeful “collaborative” approaches. These would facilitate the generation of a dynamic operating picture (DoP), providing a range of systems options with which to better manage disasters. Collaborative management and negotiated integration of technology and information use as well as process development, represent a paradigmatic shift in our thinking about disaster management. We have utilized McCann’s (1983) Negotiated Arrangements Theory (NAT) to highlight issues and problems with traditional command and control approaches and CoP, during three disaster scenarios. As a result of lessons learned from this analysis we suggest that developing a supplementary “repertoires of collaboration” approach to the negotiation of DoP for disaster management, would have a positive impact on disaster management outcomes.