Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We address the policy problem of adaptive collective action in coastal cities exposed to near-field tsunami hazards by providing a novel information infrastructure that functions in disaster-degraded environments. Timely, valid information represents a key factor in enabling self-organizing collective action in communities exposed to sudden risk from near-field tsunamis, but organizational adaptation is necessarily dependent upon a functioning technical information infrastructure. Employing an IT infrastructure based on socio-technical approach, we address the following question: “What patterns of adaptive communication flow improve or hinder individual and organizational capacity for collective action to respond to risk in a timely manner?”

Unlike current hierarchical and linear models for managing response to a disaster, disaster operations in a real situation constitutes a set of inter-dependent actions taken by multiple actors across diverse fields of expertise and jurisdictional authority from national to community levels. Because conditions for response operations change dynamically, individual responders, including neighborhood leaders, scientists, private sector managers, and community residents, need to adapt and adjust to new circumstances through self-organizing action. To build spontaneous collective action among diverse actors, cognition, communication, and coordination should be redefined to fit the reality of practice in extreme events (Comfort, 2007). Cognition provides the initial awareness of the risk; communication supports and improves contextual understanding among participants in the community regarding a shared goal; and coordination aligns actions to achieve a shared goal. These processes require technical decision support in disaster environments to manage complex, dynamic information flow.

We will report results from a suite of quasi-experiments, conducted jointly with research collaborators in Indonesia, to investigate the viability of a sociotechnical communications infrastructure to enhance organizational collective action. Participants will be residents and incident managers of a sub-district or neighborhood in Padang, Indonesia in a simulated disaster preparedness exercise. Those participants will use hand-held communications devices to exchange timely information between response operation centers and neighborhood leaders, regarding emerging risk, strategies for minimizing risk, and updates to the changing context of the hazard. By employing multiple measurements, the action will be evaluated by the degree to which use of the IT platform increases awareness, contextual understanding, workflow and coordinated action among community participants (Meissner et al., 2002; Bharosa et al., 2010; Reddy et al., 2008). Surveys of participating actors before and after our IT infrastructure simulation will assess the perceived gap in timing and clarity of information needed for decision making with and without the IT infrastructure. Metrics will include actual time spent 1) for individual organizations to response to partner organizations’ request, 2) for participating organizations to reach an agreement for the final collective decision, 3) and for community residents to completely be evacuated at assigned shelters.

The outcome and insights learned from this study will inform and guide the process of building community resilience in a wide range of disaster prone environments, as the dynamics of rapid adaptation and change for the whole community is applicable to generalized hazard responses in environments that evolve at short time scales.