Post Disaster Governance, Complexity and Network Theory

Conclusion Large-­scale disaster risks bring their own typology of actors’ networks. However, the network is not randomly formed. Interestingly, the network diameter reflects the real world network. This seems to be counter intuitive, as people may think that the level of ties or connection between any two humanitarian actors in a specific disaster ­affected geography can be less than real ­world individual networks. It is clear that without understanding the landscape of complexity, government authority may not be able to create ‘organized behavior’ among nearly thousands of reconstruction players to guaranty quality in emergency intervention and reconstruction. There are limitations in this research. Despite clear operational benefits of this approach, future works should provide more empirical evidence from recent large-­scale disasters beyond financial transaction. This analysis is limited to ‘principal-­client’ networks among donors and implementers, regardless of the localities where they work. More exploration on the different use of social network analytical tools for disaster studies is suggested. Cases from Haiti can also be presented in the future (work in progress). The application of the theory is arguably wide and can be applied in the wider context of disaster research. This includes more valuable measurements such as the density of a network that can be measured over different periods of time (rather than treating the network as a single per...
Source: PLOS Currents Disasters - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Source Type: research