Collaborations in Routine Emergency Management : Lessons from Sweden

Abstract

Effective collaborations in emergency management is the Holy Grail for practitioners in Sweden and elsewhere. More than mere coordination, interorganizational collaboration is deemed by many as the most optimal arrangement to share resources and respond to emergencies more quickly and efficiently. It is also considered to be the source of a broadly and rather vaguely defined concept of greater good. Such collaborations tend to be uncritically accepted as innovative, especially in instances of large-scale disasters or planned events while routine emergency management arrangements tend to be under researched. This research is an in-depth case study of an interorganizational collaboration in the greater Stockholm region in Sweden concerning routine emergency management. The collaboration comprises the physical relocation of one operator each from seven organizations in the area and the establishment of the "Collaboration Cluster". Rather than attempt to define the concept of "greater good" we set out to evaluate the quality of collaboration from the perspective of each member organization. We build a multi-dimensional model to assess the expectations of each organization at the political, managerial, and operative level. What is more, we view the Collaboration Cluster as a network at the operative level and for this reason we employ formal Social Network Analysis (SNA) to tease out network variables that have an effect on the quality of collaboration.