Embeddedness in cross-agency collaboration and emergency management capability: Evidence from Shanghai's urban contingency plans

Bo Fan; Ruoxuan Liu; Kun Huang; Yuxuan Zhu

doi:10.1016/j.giq.2019.101395

Embeddedness in cross-agency collaboration and emergency management capability: Evidence from Shanghai's urban contingency plans

Gov Inf Q. 2019 Oct;36(4):101395. doi: 10.1016/j.giq.2019.101395. Epub 2019 Aug 26.

Authors

Bo Fan¹, Ruoxuan Liu¹, Kun Huang², Yuxuan Zhu¹

Affiliations

¹ School of International and Public Affairs, China Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No.1954 Huashan Road, Shanghai 200030,China.
² School of Public Administration, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque 87131, NM, United States of America.

Abstract

Governments are increasingly emphasizing emergency management in response to public emergencies that cause extensive consequences and involve multiple government agencies. One of the influential measures adopted by governments is the establishment of cross-agency networks. Scholars have validated the importance of cross-agency collaboration and networks, but only a few studies have examined cross-agency information sharing and utilization mechanism of joint emergency actions. Inspired by the theory of network embeddedness, we study the joint effects of informational and task attributes of embeddedness and absorptive capacity of the leading agency on collaborative emergency capacity. Our data consist of 110 local government contingency plans collected from F District in Shanghai, China. We found that a well-structured cross-agency network and a leading department with great information accessibility will significantly affect the efficiency of emergency collaborations. The capacity to absorb information significantly enhances the improvement of emergency collaboration.

Keywords: Absorptive capacity; Cross-agency network; Embeddedness; Emergency management capacity; Information accessibility.