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have had a negative personal experience in cooperation they will
therefore be more likely to mistrust others, and successful
collaboration will be harder to achieve. Put differently, a
positive past collaboration experience is good for building trust
with potential partners, which can establish stronger
commitment, reduce costs in monitoring compliance (Agranoff
& McGuire, 2001), and result in future collaboration.
At the organizational level, past experience also plays a key
role in determining the rationale of collaborative actions
according to path dependency theory, which applies a historic
view to analyses of the determinants of policy outcomes or
political actions. Pierson (2000) uses the concept of increasing
returns, which refers to concentrating on steps in a specific
direction that cause further movement in the same direction, to
explain the appearance of path dependency. Organizations with
past experience in collaboration, on the one hand, may have
invested sunk costs in arranging the partnership; on the other
hand, these experienced organizations have more information
about building partnerships than do other organizations, which
is expected to decrease their uncertainty when taking
collaborative actions.
C. Organizational External Factors
(A) Disaster Magnitude
Collaboration is extremely important to EM because
emergencies and disasters maybe too severe to be handled by a
single public agency, and maybe not limited by jurisdictional
boundaries (McGuire & Silvia, 2010; Rubin, 2007). In general,
the hierarchy of disasters can be thought of as a pyramid with
three levels. At the base are emergencies that local government
can solve alone or with other local partners. At the second level
are emergencies that are primarily dealt with by the local
government, but state government officials and resources are