Co-creating emergency response with unaffiliated, untrained citizen volunteers
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Laurits Nielsen
Københavns Professionshøjskole Denmark
laun@kp.dk
Author(s):
While it may be argued that it is only human to want to help people in distress it not uncommon that professional responders consider their worksite as a place where unprofessional responders have no business, or they may lack the capacity to involve these in a coordinated effort. Unaffiliated volunteers in disaster response is thus a debatable issue. The assistance of ordinary citizens may be a value added to the response effort, but it may also be a constraint or an obstacle for this effort or even an additional calamity to the scene of disaster. This has been discussed by several scholars, i.e. Alexander (2010), Harris, Shaw, Scully, Smith & Hieke (2017) and Whittaker, McLennan & Handmer (2015) but none the less convergence at scenes of disaster is a longstanding fact which has caught scientific attention at least since the 1950s (Fritz & Mathewson, 1957).
In this light, the integration of unaffiliated volunteers in official coordinated response to an extent where untrained citizens are co-seated with the authorities in the their response management facility (“command post”) tasked with leading the response effort of other unaffiliated volunteers is an extraordinary case. None the less, this is the case studied here, in a coastal flooding event in Roskilde Municipality, Denmark.
This presentation will focus on developing a research framework enabling the analysis of the process of professionalizing unaffiliated volunteers which is inherent in including them in official, professional response repetitively. This includes considerations of professionalism (Hall, 2005Íž Wackerhausen, 2009), the presence of boundaries between professional and unprofessional responders (Johansson, Danielsson, Kvarnlöf, Eriksson, & Karlsson, 2018) the governance dilemmas of handling these boundaries (Schmidt, 2019) and how this leads to co-creation of the welfare good of emergency management.
Community response to crises and disasters: From preparedness to practices