Disaster relief management - A dynamic network perspective

For reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and sustainability, disasters form a recurring threat. In disaster management, dominant vertical approaches of organizational and management theory cannot solve persisting coordination problems. This paper proposes an actor-network perspective instead to understand coordination dynamics between heterogeneous local and global actors. It reconstructs dynamics of relief in a sample of disaster management networks after Tsunami 2004. Emergence and coordination of networks are examined triangulating critical incident technique, actor-network approach and content analysis. Disaster management, in an entrepreneurial perspective, appears as critical incident to sustainable local development where opportunities for innovation are seized or wasted. First suggestions regarding better coordination are derived.