Announcing the Final Examination of Ratna Okhai for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
As a quintessential role of government, emergency and crisis management requires coordination between levels of government and private and nonprofit sector organizations. Hurricane Irma in 2017 was used as the context in examining interorganizational network effectiveness. Effective and efficient policy implementation and service delivery can be key indicators of collaborative networks; however, it was equally important to understand what factors determine the effectiveness of those collaborative networks. Using network theory and network governance as the theoretical foundations, this study measured and compared the designed versus implemented networks during disaster response.
The guiding research for this study was: What factors facilitate effective implementation of interorganizational networks in response to disasters? Using a mixed-method approach, this research surveyed Florida emergency managers on their use and reliance on plan and policy documents to make decisions, analyzed the policies and plans and After-Action Reports of seven (7) Central Florida counties, utilized Twitter data to understand how social media demonstrates interorganizational networks, and employed focus group interviews to gain clarification about the differences between designed and implemented disaster response networks. This research will demonstrate the practical need to examine the interorganizational network differences between designed and implemented for disasters and crises, how policy change and adaptation can reflect the lessons learned from disaster response.
Committee in Charge: Dr. Naim Kapucu, Dr. Claire Connolly Knox, Dr. Yue ‘Gurt’ Ge, Dr. Luis Santiago, Dr. Chris Zobel
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