Volume 21, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Cross-Border and Transboundary Resilience; Guest Editors: Anouck Adrot, Monika Büscher, Frank Fiedrich, Eric Rigaud and Marcus Wiens

In recent years, resilience at and across borders has become a major concern. However, borders are characterized by complexity, emergence and creativity. This implies the need to better understand how disasters and their inherent risks are practically handled in cross-border regions. In this special issue, a diverse range of articles explore the operational, social, and technological challenges inherent to cross-border resilience.

The rise of social media has led to a new degree of spontaneous volunteering in the aftermath of disasters, even in border areas. However, spontaneous volunteering across national borders creates further obstacles that need to be addressed and prepared for. This paper introduces an agent-based simulation to examine coordination procedures of spontaneous volunteers in crisis scenarios, particularly the specifics of travel restrictions imposed after the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, research is conducted on the effects of insufficient or delayed coordination of the population’s offer of voluntary help, which reduces the motivation of volunteers and leads to missed request for help.8. The results show that coordination of spontaneous volunteers is a key factor for helping the affected population, especially in a pandemic, where the possibilities to help are limited. These results are discussed with regard to costs that need to be considered in order to establish coordination, as well as health issues and motivation of spontaneous volunteers in different coordination scenarios.

As a cross-border, transboundary crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic affected societies worldwide, compromising socio-technical systems across geographical, judicial, and administrative borders. The outbreak can be considered a health crisis, but due to the measures taken to control the spread of the virus, it also exposed the global medical supply chain’s vulnerability. Formal authorities struggling to restore the supply chain caused serious problems in the crisis response as the supply of vital medical equipment was scrutinized. However, unexpected allies including social entrepreneurial initiatives provided bottom-up solutions to restore the broken supply chain. This paper seeks to bring attention to how social entrepreneurs respond to a crisis alongside the formal crisis governance system and generate resources related to product development and logistics. By presenting a case study about how Refugee Company’s “Mondmaskerfabriek” (Face Mask Factory) engaged with the cross-border dimension of the COVID-19 crisis, we show how a social enterprise was able to establish a supply chain and domestically produce personal protection equipment. As the article shows, both crisis management scholars and policy makers should pay more attention to the potential of social entrepreneurial activities during crisis.

The impact of disasters is changing, with disaster events becoming more complex and often affecting multiple countries simultaneously. Despite this, quality management systems have not yet been established in the field of disaster medicine. The German research project QUARZ-SAND, developed a national disaster medicine quality management system and an online registry. This theoretical study ascertains the current state of quality management in disaster medicine and compares existing initiatives to QUARZ-SAND and highlights advantages and synergies in the pooling of incident data, in view of improving resilience to national and transboundary disaster events. A systematic literature research was conducted on December 18, 2020 in the databases PubMed and LIVIVO. Existing disaster medicine quality management tools were identified and compared with QUARZ-SAND. It was determined that a lot of effort is still needed to get to an internationally accepted common standard and a tool such as a registry for evaluating medical disaster responses. A first step toward the establishment of a registry is the development of a standardized data set.

The management of large-scale disasters, caused for example by natural hazards, industrial accidents or terror attacks, requires collaboration of different types of organizations. The organizations can use different equipment and tools, follow different strategies and procedures, or have different understandings of relevant terms. These differences, increasingly complex when it comes to international cooperation, can cause severe lack of interoperability that can result in vital time delays. An approach to increase interoperability in European disaster management is to standardize solutions, such as technical tools, procedures or terminology. However, standardization is not always trivial, in some cases it is impossible, in others there are challenges to overcome. In context of an EU initiative to facilitate and push standardization across all fields of European disaster management, an initial step was to gather standardization gaps in a comprehensive manner. Standardization gaps are the result of comparing end-users’ standardization needs with existing standards. Selected results of the gap analysis are presented in this article, and put into context of the general structure of disaster management standardization. Related challenges such as the proper involvement of all relevant stakeholders, and specific characteristics of the disaster management domain are addressed, and suggestions for a way forward are provided.

The main objective of the paper is analysis and proposal of a concept for establishing an efficient system for disaster management in the Western Balkan countries. After the breakup of Yugoslavia (1992), there has been no effective system for managing emergency situations, while cross-border cooperation in this respect does not exist at all. The paper provides an overview of the situation in the field of emergency and crisis management in five countries of the region and a concept of promotion and cross-border cooperation in this field. The results of the research show that no country in the region has adequate emergency and disaster management system and that, regardless of the negative experiences, an efficient multilateral cooperation system has not been established so far in this field (there is neither regulatory framework nor proposals for the model of organization and for the procedures or technical mechanisms that would make the above possible). Therefore, the concept of establishing the Regional Center for Disaster Management in the Western Balkans territory (RCDM-WB) is proposed as a first step in handling disaster situations that arise from natural phenomena or technical and technological accidents. This is the first scientifically developed proposal of this kind for the above-mentioned region.

Community awareness is a key component of disaster resilience and numerous agencies developed a plethora of preparedness materials. Previous studies evaluated national-level resources and social media content indicating that these efforts are not effectively reaching vulnerable populations, as the information is provided at or above the secondary education level. However, the local-specific content has been mostly overlooked in the analyses, subsequently neglecting the needs of areas with specific demographics and hazards, like predominantly Hispanic border communities. Thus, this study turns to local preparedness and mitigation materials, rather than general internet searches or national level documents. We analyze information provided on 239 webpages of local authorities in Cameron county in the southernmost tip of Texas. We evaluate: 1) the availability of languages and visual materials, 2) the reading difficulty level, and 3) the suitability of content. Our results demonstrate the lack of suitable and readable information provided on the local authorities’ websites with the average readability level implying “difficult” to “very confusing”, and the average suitability score equivalent to “below average/adequate”. Moreover, the lack of Spanish-language content indicates an under-utilization of the otherwise vernacular language. We discuss those results in the socio-cultural context of the border community.