The role of documents in collaboration within the UK Integrated Emergency Management System

De Mel, Rukshan

Abstract

Effective collaboration between involved stakeholders is a crucial requirement in most any disaster management scenario, where increasingly every stage is a multi-agency effort. In the UK, Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) form the platform for this engagement between agencies, bringing a range of public and private bodies together – with 38 such across England alone, representing over 300 local authorities. Much of the legitimacy for emergency management in the UK is derived from the Civil Contingencies Act (2004). It and its associated guidance documents are a primary vehicle by which both legal duties and best practice are communicated from national to local level. This study centres on the documentary supporting structures formed by such national guidance, both statutory and non-statutory. National guidance can be described as balancing act of standardisation against subsidiarity, a contentious issue. Furthermore, there are gaps in the understanding of the role of documents in supporting an environment for effective collaboration, with a lack of defining characteristics of a body of documents that would enhance collaboration. It is also little explored how clearly national guidance and documents describe the collaboration seen in practice, or how the documents themselves affect stakeholders’ context of collaboration and the extent to which familiarisation with the guidance would allow stakeholders to participate more effectively as a collaborative participant during an incident.
To investigate this and determine how such structures could be improved to increase the effectiveness of existing collaboration, a qualitative research approach was taken. The study follows a pragmatist philosophy and abductive reasoning, using an in-depth qualitative analysis of 1) a critical case selection of documents and 2) the stakeholder perceptions of stakeholder within LRFs across England. The results highlight that despite being derived from the same legislation and guidance, LRFs show significant differences in form and procedure – from allocated funding, capacity, frequency of meetings, membership outside of the core, participation, to delegation of roles and responsibilities between partners to name a few. The guidance itself has many shortcomings, with heavy redundancy between large volumes of text, broadly suitable only for an audience already well-versed in the content. The study developed a documentary assessment framework and sets forth
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recommendations on how guidance should be improved as a set. It further developed a framework to conceptualise the relationship of stakeholder interaction with guidance and policy.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 6, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 30, 2023
• Award Date: Sep 29, 2023