Integrating volunteers in emergency response. A strategy for increased resilience within German civil security research.

Abstract

New forms of volunteering in events of emergencies and crisis are connected to the political goal of resilience within a growing number of applied research projects. This chapter offers an analysis of how factors such as long-term national research strategies, funding programmes supporting user- and market-driven applied research, expectations of a testable innovation, events such as the European 2013 flooding in Germany, citizens' engagement and new social media work together in the formation of new approaches to volunteering within emergency and crisis response systems. By defining the population as being potentially active and engaged, these new forms of volunteer involvement aim to move beyond self-help in order to increase societal resilience. This chapter does also illustrate how resilience is operationalised within corresponding applied research projects in Germany. In order to do so, we will present the results of a full-scale scenario-based emergency exercise carried out as part of one of these projects. A comprehensive mapping of the research landscape is outside the scope of this chapter. However, we aim to address how a variety of factors are making up complex relations rather than linear and decisive patterns towards a predefined goal; the way the goal - the project outcome - is reached and the shape the innovation takes may be seen as an assemblage of structural, societal, environmental and technical conditions.