سیستم های مدیریت اضطراری و حوادث در مناطق شهری

This article focuses on the factors shaping and constituting governance in urban/metropolitan emergency management. The main focus of the article is the multi-faceted inter-organizational relationships producing shared goals that are practiced at the local level, and specifically within the context of county-level metropolitan emergency management. The article presents a conceptual understanding of the governance concept, a brief summary of related research in the context of emergency management, and an example of the Orlando Metropolitan Area in the State of Florida for practical purposes.

The way public service is delivered today has dramatically changed over the last decades. While there has been a change in the range of actors delivering those services, the most important reform has been observed in the tools and forms of service delivery. Today public agencies are not the only providers of services that traditionally used to be or were considered ‘public’: non-profit and for-profit agencies as well as ordinary citizens have become the stakeholders and actors taking on the roles and responsibilities of service provision at all stages of the process. The notion that embraces the processes and activities of all those inter-dependent actors is known and advocated today as governance. The term governance, by simplest definition, entails inter-sector and inter-governmental collaboration which delivers specific services to the citizens. Governance has become one of the main tools to address complex and multi-faceted societal issues today. One of such fields is emergency management, which has experienced substantial changes over the past years especially due to the increased impacts of disasters on the society. It is impossible to imagine emergency management today as a field comprising agencies acting on their own; governments at all levels seek and establish partnerships, whether formal or informal, to tackle issues of complex nature. This article briefly describes the notion of governance and how the concept is practiced in the field of emergency management in the context of urban/metropolitan environments. An example of the Orlando Metropolitan Area in the State of Florida is provided to show how governance has become an indispensable part of today’s emergency management practices. Disaster and emergency management in urban areas The term governance has been used in the literature in several forms varying from collaborative governance to collaborative public management. While the nuances are there depending on the focus and of location of the issues addressed, the term governance coincides or overlaps the concept describing network relationships and partnership arrangements among several actors, representing different sectors and levels of government that come together to address a common goal and produce shared results. Specifically, it is a consensus-oriented and deliberative process (Ansell & Gash, 2007) with shared decision-making (Freeman & Peck, 2007) directed towards shaping and influencing a public policy (Klijn & Koppenjan, 2000). Governance refers to the management of networks that are formed and maintained to solve complex problems (Peters and Pierre, 1998 and Salamon, 2002). Governance networks require organizations to work collaboratively to solve common problems and reach convergent organizational goals. This may lead to fuzzy organizational boundaries (Stoker, 1998). Additionally, organizations operating in governance networks strengthen their connections with multiple relationships (Milward and Provan, 2000 and Rhodes, 1996). Collaborative relationships are products of joined efforts for reaching common goals, combined resources, shared decision making, and accountability for final product (Kamensky, Burlin, & Abramson, 2004). In the simplest sense, collaboration is a set of activities directed towards the achievement of “common goals, often working across boundaries and in multi-sector and multi-actor relationships” (Agranoff & McGuire, 2003, p. 4). Feiock (2004) argues that metropolitan governance today is in practice across many fields and disciplines, and existing research has focused only on competition, thus undermining the importance of cooperation. In fact, he claims, cooperation is a stronger aspect of metropolitan governance that researchers should focus on, which is the binding glue of all inter-organizational relationships at the metropolitan level. Ahrens and Rudolph (2006), in turn, argue that governance should be applied across all levels of government including community and local levels, with specific focus on the capacity-building of respective governments. Effective disaster management at these levels is argued to be possible through the implementation of governance elements including accountability, participation, predictability, and transparency. These aspects of governance should be the main factors shaping and determining inter-organizational relationships among the different sectors and levels of government. Overall, though, all these values and capacities should be the contributors to disaster resilient urban communities that, according to Pierce, Budd, and Lovrich (2011), should be able to absorb change-producing disturbances comprising including natural disasters and emergencies.

This article presented a brief review of the literature on urban/metropolitan emergency management governance using the Orlando Metropolitan Area as an example. The literature suggests that urban/metropolitan emergency management today has become an arena for collaborative practices with a stress on local capacity building for effective results. Much of what happens at local level is an example of the multi-level networked governance of inter-organizational relationships directed towards a common goal in the context of emergency management. Investment into local capacity that would nurture networked governance oriented structures is important from practical point of view. Meanwhile, the way emergency management networks are shaped should be locality-specific and needs-based. Also emphasized is the need to apply and strengthen governance characteristics such as participation, flexibility, accountability and transparency in the context of urban/metropolitan emergency management.