Poster #136 - Coordinating Public Organizations for Emergency Response: A Systematic Review and Conceptual Framework Development

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Abstract

Public sector organizations face increasing demands to coordinate effectively during emergencies and disasters, yet research on inter-organizational response coordination remains fragmented across disciplinary silos. Although scholars increasingly recognize that coordination involves both structural arrangements and emergent adaptation, these perspectives are usually treated separately, leaving how coordination actually unfolds in practice underspecified. To address the gap, our study conducts a systematic review of 74 peer-reviewed articles published over the past two decades, examines how existing research conceptualizes and develops an integrative conceptual framework for inter-organizational coordination among public organizations during emergency and disaster response.

The review identifies three major research streams. The first examines coordination as a set of activities and practices enacted during response, including information sharing, shared understanding development, inter-organizational decision-making, and improvised action. The second treats coordination as an outcome shaped by influential factors, including relatively stable pre-disaster conditions, such as institutional arrangements, routine operating environments, and organizational attributes, as well as situational contingencies that emerge and evolve during response. The third adopts a network perspective, examining patterns of inter-organizational interaction during crises, including focal actors, relationship formation, and coordination performance.

Building on this synthesis, we develop a conceptual framework that links structural and emergent dimensions of response coordination. Pre-disaster conditions define the initial structural parameters within which coordination unfolds. Amid-disaster dynamics, by contrast, represent the emergent features of coordination and comprise three interrelated components: situational contingencies, coordination activities and practices, and incident characteristics. The framework emphasizes recursive interactions among these elements and treats network patterns as observable manifestations of underlying coordination dynamics. A key insight is that situational contingencies are not exogenous inputs to coordination; they are shaped by coordination activities while constraining and enabling subsequent actions. This recursive dynamic gives greater specificity to the widely invoked but analytically underspecified notion of emergent coordination. It locates emergence in the ongoing interplay between contingencies and activities, rather than treating it as a mere descriptive label.

The study makes three contributions. First, it engages with the longstanding tension between structural and emergent perspectives by articulating how these elements intertwine through a concrete processual account. Second, it begins to unpack the emergent dimension of coordination by identifying situational contingencies as a key mechanism through which emergence operates during response. Third, it offers a shared analytical vocabulary and conceptual foundation for more cumulative research across currently disconnected strands of coordination scholarship. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Author

• Tianyi Xiang, Peking University
  Presenting Author