The Evolution of Emergency Management Networks: A Multi-Modal Assessment of Two Evacuation Hosting Networks from 2000-2009

Emergency management is a field in which collaborative activities are inescapable. Emergency planning and response increasingly involves a diverse array of actors across fields (emergency management,public health, law enforcement, etc.), sector (government, nonprofit,and for-profit), and level of government (local, state, and federal). The necessity of collaboration is built into the logic of escalation in the Stafford Act and the nature of emergency events as boundary spanning threats. While the necessity of collaboration is clear, the dynamics of this collaboration are less well understood. This paper assesses the temporal dynamics of emergency management networks in two moderately sized communities that have served as evacuation hosting sites in the past decade. The paper uses two strategies for tracking the evolution of these networks across time. First, we develop an annual network map using newspaper and newswire data sources. Second, we develop a view of the evolution by analyzing emergency operations plans for each community. Analysis of data from these two strategies reveals biases built into each method. The media data include a wide variety of actors, many of whom do not persist through the time period. The formal plan data include only a small number of actors who largely persist throughout the time period. What is not clear is which of these images of the networks is more accurate. The paper concludes with a discussion of the difficulty of mixed methods network research.