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Exploring the dynamics
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Donor governments (e.g., federal or state governments) provide
incentives for recipient governments to implement certain
initiatives or policies with certain emphases and they typically
set some regulatory conditions in the grants. Recipient
governments (e.g., local governments) are required to find the
balance between the donors’ preferences and local tastes to
secure their grants and satisfy local needs.
In the context of EM, vertical collaboration also involves
intergovernmental grants. Although local governments serve as
the first respondents to emergencies, their expenditure on
mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery rely heavily on
federal grant programs. These grants are offered in the form of
categorical grants, which are accompanied by various political
guidelines and bureaucratic rules (Sylves, 2007). In order to be
funded successfully, local governments must “prepare and
submit an application; prove that they deserve the funds; meet
ever-changing conditions (even after the grants are awarded);
demonstrate how the money is being spent; document (often in
painstakingly detail) how the funding has enhanced EM; and
obey time limits that stipulate when the federal funds will be
made available, when they may be obligated, and when they may
be spent” (Sylves, 2007: 301).
Moreover, local governments are also required to
participate in a standardized national system such as the
National Response Framework (NRF) and National Incident
Management System (NIMS) in order to coordinate efficiently
with the federal government to deal with natural disasters and
terrorist attacks. These national plans and systems can be seen
as another form of vertical collaboration (McEntire & Dawson,
2007). Recently, Brooks, Bodeau, and Fedorowicz (2012)
collected empirical data from multiple cases to develop a
conceptual framework characterizing both the vertical and
horizontal dimensions of interorganizational complexity. How
state-level emergency managers articulate large-scale response