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sign mutual aid agreements with other nearby local governments
in order to share human resources when dealing with personnel
shortages.
Moreover, local governments may face a shortage of
information, intelligence, or skills to conduct emergency
planning, preparedness, or response, especially for local
governments with small populations. Thus, they may need extra
training or related technical assistance from different partners,
which increases the opportunities for collaboration.
Neighboring local governments can provide good examples for
local governments to learn from and from which to request
information-sharing as they share similar risks. Agranoff and
McGuire (2003) point out that vertical collaboration can
happen when local governments seek grants, program-oriented
information, or assistance from state and federal governments.
Local governments may also collaborate with non-profit
organizations such as the American Red Cross and the United
Way, or work with private utility and phone companies to keep
communication systems stable and operational during disasters.
(B) Organizational Attention
Natural or man-made disasters, which EM deal with, can
be viewed as one type of focusing events (Birkland, 2009). These
focusing events easily attract attention from the media, the
public, and local policy makers, providing local policy
entrepreneurs working on related policy areas with increased
opportunities to set the agenda and attain resources during the
policy-formulation process (Birkland, 1997, 2006). Similarly,
these focusing events draw the attention of local governments
and prompt it to invest more local funding or manpower in EM
and consider strategies to effectively respond to future possible
hazards. In other words, a situation where a local government
uses more of its own resources to support EM implies that this
local government pays more attention to this policy area. When