Mobile Apps for Flood Emergency Management in China: Functionality, Usefulness, and Coproduction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the functionality of mobile applications (apps) in flood disasters in China, their usefulness in flood emergency management, and their ability to enable coproduction between participating parties. By conducting a tri-fold analysis on twenty-three mobile apps used nationwide and within Zhejiang province during the 2020-21 flood seasons, this paper finds that mobile apps have established an interconnected, multi-layered, and multi-functional information infrastructure for flood emergency management in China. Mobile apps have the potential to contribute in their respective ways to the core elements and phases of emergency management. In addition, these apps are found able to create the conditions for coproduction across sectors, which was corroborated by some good practice examples from media reports. However, governmental apps are found less ready to engage in cross-sector coproduction although they show signs of cross-department coproduction within the sub-nation government units. It implies a tension between the current way the government facilitates mobile apps in emergency management and the citizen empowerment by the mobile apps. This research contributes to the fields of information and communication technologies (ICT), emergency management communication and collaboration as one of the few studies examining mobile apps in China from the standpoint of emergency management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]