Emergency management is the quintessential public service. Thus, it is imperative to understand how emergency management value is co-produced and/or co-created in a governance environment when responding to crisis and disasters. This research focuses on the role of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) in co-creating and/or co-producing value in responding to Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in Texas at the end of August 2017.
In the United States, the Coast Guard is a federal agency with several missions inherent to guaranteeing the security and safety of the US coast line. The study will focus on the co-production and/or co-creation of value in fulfilling the USCG missions such as the preservation of life and protection of ports and waterways.
The paper will describe the role of the USCG within the US response system in responding to disasters and will discusses the concepts of co-creation and co-production within the field of emergency management. The paper seeks to answer the following research questions: How the USCG perceived their role co-creating value when responding to Hurricane Harvey and how they prepared, if they did so, for value co-creation? In other words, which policies, procedures or forms of previous training did the USCG personnel deem most productive in co-creating value. For instance, one of the challenges faced by the USCG in performing their search and rescue mission during Harvey was the decision by the mayor of Houston to shelter citizens in place rather than evacuate them. The decision led to a massive search and rescue in the aftermath of the storm that required the intervention of USCG personnel from different US states. During this operation the USCG encountered some obstacles related to the creation and co-creation of value due to the fact that the USCG was not prepared to receive rescue requests through social media.
In order to study the co-creation and co-production of value, the study will use a qualitative approach. Data collection will be made up of primary and secondary data and data will be triangulated. Primary data will be collected using semi-structured interviews of USCG personnel. Interviews will focus on the USCG accounts of their experiences both in rescuing people and in protecting ports and waterways. Secondary data such as state and local government emergency plans and local newspapers will be collected. Data will also be collected through the use of news Database such as LexisNexis and search engines such as Google news. Data will be analyzed using Atlas.ti software for qualitative analysis.
