Barriers and Facilitators in Interorganizational Disaster Response: Identifying Examples Across Europe

Abstract Disaster response actors are facing new challenges, which encompass not only new and ever more complex threats but also the need to collaborate across organizational boundaries and even state borders. Depending on scale, these interactions have to work across governance setups, political and legal conditions, organizational cultures, as well as personal preferences and experiences that vary among actors, organizations, and countries. But which concrete measures are taken by crisis management actors at different scales to bridge these challenges and which of these could serve others as example to address comparable challenges in their contexts? This study made attempts to analyze whether certain solutions across organizations and states exist that facilitate effective interorganizational crisis management in the member states of the European Union (EU). It is based on selected expert interviews with representatives of different types of disaster response organizations (health services, police services, fire services, and other crisis management organizations) from seven EU member states (Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and Greece).