Volunteer Co-production in Emergency Management in Excluded Areas

Abstract

This study explores ICT-enabled co-production using civil citizens and semi-professionals as volunteer first responders in excluded areas, in order to identify key factors and to compare the groups. It shows that volunteers can make a major difference if arriving first at an emergency site, e.g. saving lives, administering CPR and extinguishing fires. The semi-professionals are more protected than civil citizens where challenges relate to individual versus collective engagement, gender aspects, language barriers or insufficient legal protection. However, the citizens have an advantage in relying on easily accessible ICT support installed on their own mobile phones. For the initiatives to expand and enable long-term engagement, calibrated ICT solutions matching competence, role and language with incident and area are needed. The study confirms previous research arguing for the merging of policy science and information systems research in a rapidly digitalized public-sector transformation, but adds that they need to be complemented by perspectives from sociology in initiatives involving excluded areas.