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This paper analyzes the voluntary involvement of two Red Cross organizations engaged in post-disaster cross-sector collaborative efforts for the 2004 Asian Tsunami and the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake. Using Bryson, Crosby, and Stone's expanded model for nonprofit collaboration as a framework, I compare and contrast the disaster management collaborated by both voluntary organizations. The findings illuminate the strengths of voluntary involvement in disaster collaborative management, as well as its limitations during extreme events. Implications of the findings for cross-border voluntary contributions are discussed.

Despite the emphasis placed on agility in uncertain situations such as extreme events, no comparative data exist to look into the determinants that drive agility. For crisis response managers, the failure to develop agility threatens organizations' survival amid uncertainties. This paper investigates the development of agility and explains the emergence of agility against the fight of influenza A/H1N1 pandemics in Singapore and Taiwan in 2009. This paper further provides empirically grounded evidence to identify prerequisites for agility development in response to public health crises in East Asia.

Response, Training, Logistics, Southeast Asia, Disaster management, Disaster relief, N25, O54,

Rapid worldwide growth in public policy education now offers excellent opportunities to assess the development of the field from a comparative perspective. Our analysis, which examines recent trends in public policy education by comparing public policy analysis courses taught in professional degree programs in China and in the United States, reveals considerable disparities in these curricula as taught in the two countries. Surprisingly, these differences have emerged primarily through disciplinary foci, expertise in policy analysis, and practical experience among instructors, rather than through the distinctive social, political, institutional, and historical characteristics of the two countries. Our findings also suggest that a positivist approach to policy analysis continues to dominate classroom discussions in US programs, despite intense debates in the literature regarding the utility of that approach in guiding actual practice.

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Collaborative capacity serves for organizations as the capacity to collaborate with other network players. Organizational capacity matters as collaboration outcomes usually go beyond single-shot implementation efforts or a single-minded focus on either the vertical dimension of program or the horizontal component. This review article explores organizational collaborative capacities from the perspective of public management, in particular, network theory. By applying the 5 attributes of network theory-interdependence, membership, resources, information, and learning-to the explanation of collaborative capacity in fighting pandemic crises, I argue in some ways organizational collaborative capacity is very much like an organization in its own right. Studying collaborative capacity in the battle against pandemics facilitate our understanding of multisectoral collaboration in technical, political, and institutional dimensions, and greatly advances the richness of capacity vocabulary in pandemic response and preparedness.

Singapore is vulnerable to both natural and man-made disasters alongside its remarkable economic growth. One of the most significant disasters is the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. The SARS outbreak was eventually contained through a series of risk mitigating measures introduced by the Singapore government. This would not be possible without the engagement and responsiveness of the general public. This paper begins with a description of Singapore's historical disaster profiles, the policy and legal framework in the all-hazard management approach. We use a case study to highlight the disaster impacts and insights drawn from Singapore's risk management experience with specific references to the SARS epidemic. We draw on the lesson-learning from Singapore's experience in fighting the SARS epidemic, and discuss implications for future practice and research in disaster risk management. The implications are explained in four aspects: staying vigilant at the community level, remaining flexible in a national command structure, the demand for surge capacity, and collaborative governance at regional level. This paper concludes with a presence of the flexible command structure on both the way and the extent it was utilized. This helps to explain the success level of the containment of the SARS epidemic.