Grass-Root Organisations, Intergovernmental Collaboration, and Emergency Preparedness: An Institutional Collective Action Approach

This paper examines the importance of grass-root emergency response groups in emergency preparedness. Consistent with the Institutional Collective Action framework, we highlight key constraints associated with local government strategies of mutual resource exchange and barriers to intergovernmental collaboration. We examine local governments’ emergency preparedness using survey data collected in the North Central Texas region. We employed a simple OLS analysis to determine mutual exchange and Poisson estimations on the likelihood of local governments receiving and providing external assistance. Findings showed that the presence of grass-root organisations in a jurisdiction is associated with emergency preparedness, highlighting the importance of norms of volunteerism. Local political institutions and participation in federally funded programmes also have an effect on local government decisions.