Dissertation
Sensemaking in crises: a study of collaborative governance between humanitarian response organizations and virtual & technical communities
How do Humanitarian Response Organizations (HROs) and Virtual & Technical Communities (V&TCs) collaboratively govern disaster sensemaking processes, and what challenges shape the effectiveness of these collaborations between 2010 and 2016?
- Author
- John Philip Sabou
- Date
- 10 February 2022
The manuscript offers longitudinal research concerning the Collaborative Governance of disaster sensemaking between Humanitarian Response Organizations (HROs) and Virtual and Technical Communities (V&TCs). Over the past several years, the HROs have increasingly relied on new informational and social technologies to improve their disaster sensemaking with various methods, including crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, and blockchain funds. Between 2010-2016, these methods were shared by the V&TCs, in an effort to stop-gap the enormous cost of developing new digital capacities internally.
The research herein focuses on the challenges to creating a conducive environment for producing information products that utilized ‘big data’ to inform decision-makers in humanitarian deployments. These ongoing challenges also illustrate a broader evolution of the humanitarian aid sector as it increasingly populates with more actors seeking to contribute to humanitarian agendas. The manuscript makes use of interview responses and supporting literature to sketch how collaborations were instantiated and sustained between the HROs and V&TCs. The study contributes generalizable contributions to crisis management literature as well as the state of art of Collaborative Governance.