The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented an unprecedented public health crisis across the globe. Governments have developed different approaches to tackle the complex and intractable challenge, showing variations in their effectiveness and results. South Korea has achieved exceptional performance thus far: It has flattened the curve of new infections and brought the outbreak under control without imposing forceful measures such as lockdowns and travel ban. This commentary addresses the South Korean government’s response to COVID-19 and highlights distributed cognition and crisis management capabilities as critical factors. The authors discuss how the South Korean government has cultivated distributed cognition and three core capabilities—reflective-improvement, collaborative, and data-analytical capabilities—after its painful experience with 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV). South Korea’s adaptive approaches and its learning path examined in this commentary provide practical implications for managing potential additional waves of COVID-19 and a future public health crisis.

Despite the growing interest in interorganizational border management, relatively little is known about antecedents that drive such coordination efforts emerging in and around border regions. This case study uses exponential random graph models to test hypotheses about the antecedents of a border management coordination network in El Paso, Texas. The analysis demonstrates that actors tend to build tightly closed relationships through bonding and clustering, while also seeking cross-sectoral partnerships. In addition, actors tend to build ties with public organizations, and with organizations that represent regional interests/issues in the border management context. The research discusses the findings and offers some policy and administrative implications to enhance actor relationships within the border management network.

International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) have played critical roles in improving the quality of primary health care in ordinary time and, indeed, responding to epidemic crises in developing countries. Due to a lack of empirical research for effectiveness of their responding activities, the legitimacy and accountability of nonprofits’ engagement in the health crisis as a critical responder is doubted. This paper aims to examine the effectiveness of INGOs in a context of managing a fatal epidemic outbreak of Ebola in Sierra Leone during May–November, 2014; building healthcare infrastructures, providing medical supplies, educating local residents, and training response staffs. The analysis results show that development of healthcare infrastructures and provision of medical supplies have been significantly effective in terms of decreasing the severity of the crisis in chiefdoms. The findings imply that policy tools, which allow INGOs to enter to the field in a timely manner, can improve the effectiveness of INGOs’ responses in current and future epidemic outbreaks in developing countries where people suffer from a lack of health infrastructures.

Objectives. This study explores trends of public attention to natural disasters, emphasizing the importance of public attention for disaster management and its relevance to policy adaptation. Methods. Public attention was measured as Google Trends' time-series Search Volume Index (SVI). We compare the trend of SVI for the 2016 Louisiana Flood with SVI trends for other disasters of varying size, scale, and scope within the United States. Then, we compared the trend of relative SVI for the flood with other ongoing social/political events over the same observation period.Results. Public attention to the 2016 Louisiana Flood formed and matured relatively faster than other national disasters in the comparison group. However, the flood disaster was not leading public attention at the national level. Conclusions. Not late but less public attention might have affected disaster management operations for 2016 Louisiana Flood. Authors address some practical implications and strategies for rising public attention to natural disasters.

While culture in emergency management has gained attention from the field of risk communication, few have systemically dealt with the nuances of general culture involved in the formation and differentiation of risk communication. To fill this gap, this research aims to first examine cultural nuances from the 2016 Louisiana flood response by primarily focusing on communications embedded in social media. The results from social network analysis and content analysis highlight that the flood response communication had strong cultural characteristics, highlighting the notion that of the cultures in Louisianafaith-based, local authority, and nonprofits-were the prominent cultural responders in the flood response communication. In particular, cultural similarity in both intra/inter group response communication was observed, with each communication group comprising actors who shared a common cultural background and spoke similar keywords.

Urgent public health threats present a growing problem for public health surge. This study addresses tensions that occur in organizations as they confront unexpected, urgent demands for performance that exceed their existing allocation of resources and personnel, patterns of adaptation in response, and consequences for continued functionality in their mission. We view the problem through a conceptual lens of complex adaptive systems and distributed cognition to focus on patterns of organizational communication as critical factors in shaping organizational response to crisis operations. We employ a mixed-methods approach to examine communication and coordination patterns in a small-N comparative case study of four California county health departments during the H1N1 threat in late spring-summer of 2009 and the following 24 months. Findings indicate factors that contribute to, or inhibit, the communication process, such as organizational structure, past experiences, exercise of authority, and document the occurrence of defensive routines as a distortion of internal communication practices. Communication and coordination within and among entities engaged in response operations are critical to managing urgent public health threats, indicating that mechanisms which place a cognitive burden on staff exacerbate existing problems in performance.

This article presents a novel theoretical approach that aims to enhance the accountability of street-level bureaucrats. The authors conceptualize changes and reforms in and around the public sector as a smart mechanism that is composed of two key dimensions; a) smart principles (i.e., institutions and technological tools that support citizen participation), and b) smart principals (i.e., citizens who adopt those smart principles in monitoring and evaluating street-level agents’ behaviors). Then the authors suggest a theoretical framework that explains how applying the smart mechanism can limit deviant behaviors of street-level bureaucrats and contribute to enhancing street-level accountability.

Although network analysis has gained much attention in emergency management studies, there are few systematic reviews of emergency management network studies in public administration. After reviewing 44 journals, this article identified and reviewed a total of 58 studies that conducted network analysis in the context of emergency management. Based on existing literature, this article summarizes the common and unique factors driving network formation and development, describes the structural characteristics of emergency management networks, and reports the performance measures that have been used to evaluate network performance. It concludes by addressing research gaps, presenting propositions and recommendations for future research, and highlighting implications for emergency management practice. The context of this review is emergency management, but the three network research streams focused upon—network formation and development, network properties, and network performance—are relevant to all management and policy domains. This review also underscores the need to further explore the dynamic process of network formation and outcomes of network relationships and structures.