Temporary Organizations in Disaster Response: Crisis, Temporality, and Governance

For most modern governments, disasters are events that are demarcated from so-called normalcy by changes in organization and temporality. As much as the changes in procedures or staffing, these new structures are distinguished by their temporality. They are explicitly temporary organizations, designed to accomplish a specific task before dissolving and returning authority to the permanent organization. The choice to change to temporary organizations in times of crisis carries a number of implications. The switch to an entity that is both a part of the government, and distinct from it and that will disappear at some unspecified but unswervingly expected point in the future when the crisis is “over” points to a distinct separation between the disaster period and “normalcy,” and indicates that the disaster period will give way to normalcy again. It allows the government to portray the crisis as exogenous and separate from on-going policies, depicting it as the result of uncontrollable natural forces that must be dealt with on an ad hoc basis and ignoring links to long-term governance in areas of education, housing, health, and other areas. This paper uses original interviews and documentary data, collected as dissertation research, to look at the formation, dissolution, and occasional failure of temporary, government-based disaster management organizations across two events: Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan.