Disaster Narratives in Emergency Services: Tools for Crisis and Disaster Governance

Abstract

This paper explores how narratives shape our understanding of crises and disasters and, by extension, drive organizational practices in crisis and disaster governance (CDG). Based on interviews and focus group discussions with representatives from two types of emergency services—namely, road maintenance services and forest fire management organizations—we systematically catalog the narratives developed to understand past crisis and disaster events based on the narrative typology posited by Seeger and Sellnow (2016) and draw on theories of sensemaking and the social construction of reality. We devote special attention to the 2021 Ahr Valley floods, showing how unexpected disaster events can generate narratives that modify an organization's outlook on the future. While our data are retrospective, we observe instances where narrative shifts are associated with sensemaking processes. Our empirical findings suggest that the narratives developed to understand past events play a crucial role in determining how emergency services prepare for and react to future crises and disasters. Accordingly, we argue that actors involved in CDG would be well advised to devote attention to the narrative dimensions of organizational culture when developing disaster preparation and prevention strategies.