Logotyp: till Försvarshögskolans hemsida

Managing disasters generally demands multiorganizational collaboration and collaborative skills. In Turkey, observed shortcomings in disaster management collaboration prompted a reorganization of the disaster management system that led to the emergence of a centralized hybrid network. The network governance literature generally heralds decentralized organization and shared network governance, which facilitate collaboration by maximizing trust and legitimacy and minimizing power imbalances. Through the use of 24 semi-structured interviews, this article's objective is to assess the applicability of prior theoretical assumptions regarding interorganizational collaboration in a political-administrative context different from that in which they were originally developed. The study contributes to the theoretical discussion about how political-administrative system attributes might influence interorganizational disaster management collaboration. The results suggest that ‘tailor-fitting’ interorganizational network designs to the political-administrative culture can be beneficial for collaborative disaster management. Furthermore, results suggest that more effort should be devoted to examining cases where actors manage to overcome barriers to collaboration despite challenging institutional and political-administrative landscapes.

Local and civil society can play decisive roles in disaster response. Yet, the disaster management literature is unclear regarding the conditions that enable cross-sectoral collaboration. Using a collaborative governance framework and 44 semi-structured interviews, this study investigates how trust, pre-existing relations, interdependence, knowledge, and resources affect cross-sectoral collaboration during disaster response in Turkey. The results illustrate how these factors interact with system context factors, like political compatibility, to facilitate or hinder cross-sectoral collaboration. The study concludes that cross-sectoral collaboration is no panacea for successful disaster response but empirical examples suggest that cross-sectoral collaboration can contribute to reducing suboptimal disaster response.

Global disaster policy frameworks promote decentralization as a prerequisite of good disaster governance. Using 44 interviews, this study contributes to the literature that focuses on disasters and decentralization by investigating three systemic mechanisms that seemingly challenge decentralization of disaster management in Turkey: introduction of oversight systems, resource-allocation failure, and central–local collaboration. The results indicate that these mechanisms are enabled by a combination of political-administrative system characteristics and disaster-induced processes. To better understand how to secure the benefits of decentralization, we should engage with a wide range of disaster management actor perspectives, and integrate research on political-administrative systems and collaborative governance.