From plan to practice: Interorganizational crisis response networks from governmental guidelines and real-world collaborations during hurricane events

Crisis response involves extensive planning and coordination within and across a multitude of agencies and organisations. This study explores how on-the-ground crisis response efforts align with crisis response guidelines. These guidelines are key to the effectiveness of crisis response. To this end, we construct, analyse and compare emergency response networks by using network analysis and natural language processing methods. Differences between plans and practice, that is, false positives (actions delivered but not prescribed) and false negatives (actions prescribed but not delivered), can impact response evaluation and policy revisions. We investigate collaboration networks at the federal, state and local level extracted from official documents (prescribed networks) and empirical data (observed networks) in the form of situational reports (n = 109) and tweets (n = 28,050) from responses to major hurricanes that made landfall in the United States. Our analyses reveal meaningful differences between prescribed and observed collaboration networks (mean node overlap ~9.94%, edge overlap ~3.94%). The observed networks most closely resemble federal-level networks in terms of node and edge overlap, highlighting the prioritisation of federal response guidelines. We also observed a high ratio of false positives, that is, nongovernmental, nonprofit and volunteer organizations, that play a critical role in crisis response and are not mentioned in response plans. These findings enable us to evaluate the current best practices for response and inform emergency response policy planning.