The Role of Coalitions in Disaster Policymaking

Disasters have the potential to act as focusing events, which can increase the amount of attention on disaster-related problems and encourage policy action. Understanding of the political characteristics of disaster policymaking is underdeveloped, yet it is known that these features may be dissimilar to those of non-disaster policy areas, especially concerning the coalitions of policy actors engaged in the disaster policy process. Coalitions in the realm of disaster policy processes may be less likely to form, may look very different, and may have different goals than those in non-disaster domains. Knowledge of the emergence, composition, and purpose of coalitions in disaster policy is lacking. This paper draws on prior theory and case observations to define and describe the characteristics of a disaster policy subsystem and to build a typology of coalitions that may appear within such a subsystem, providing a foundation upon which scholars can work to study coalition dynamics in disaster policy subsystems.