Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the involvement of government and non-government institutions in building a collaborative disaster response. Drawing on fieldwork in Indonesia, this paper analyses the barrier and opportunities in collaborative disaster response.

Paper long abstract:

Fours' perspective becomes the underpinning concept of this research, such as public administration, network theory, collaborative governance, and disaster management. The government increasingly adopts and encourages collaboration as the public administration paradigm shifts from old public administration to new public governance. The actors have tied each other in a formal and informal network trying to solve complex problems, including disasters. Collaborative governance in disaster management faces challenges, shared authority, power imbalance, trust, and other contextual factors such as government capacities, communities' resilience, social and political context, the geography of the location, type of disaster, and impact of the disaster. This research aims to explore the collaborative disaster response between government and non-government organisations and investigate the enabling and challenges in developing a collaborative approach during disaster response. This research focuses on various actors' collaboration in disaster response and looks closely at the snapshot of health cluster collaboration.

This paper analyses the involvement of government and non-government institutions in building a collaborative disaster response. Drawing on fieldwork in Indonesia, this paper analyses the barrier and opportunities in maintaining a reliable disaster response and balance in working with various institutions. Indonesia has adopted cluster management and encouraged the involvement of multiple actors in disaster management, as stated by The Sendai Framework. As a disaster-prone developing country, Indonesia is the ninth country with a greater risk based on multi-hazard average annual loss and the fourth country with the most significant risk considering the country's geographical risk (UNESCAP, 2019).

This research explores the collaborative practice during the disaster response stage in the West Nusa Tenggara Province Earthquake in Indonesia in 2018 by conducting a semi-structured interview. Sixty-six informants were interviewed during fieldwork in the West Nusa Tenggara Province and DKI Jakarta Province in 2022. The informants are stakeholders who had a role and involvement during the disaster response in 2018 that represent the central government, provincial government, regency or city government, academicians, non-government organisations, and faith-based organisations.

This research found that formal and informal collaboration appears during disaster response in health clusters. The government initiated a collaborative platform followed by government and non-government organisations. The third sector also seems to have a strong relationship and developed informal collaboration among the non-government organisations. Findings demonstrate the development of an informal partnership was motivated by the concern over the speed of distribution or distrust of government bureaucracy. The research found a bureaucratic and administrative capacity that, on the one hand, enables a collaborative and reliable disaster response and hinders the collaborative process. For example, provincial and national governments' organisational capacity to disburse funding schemes for emergencies/disasters enables health service delivery in all areas.

On the other hand, the financing bureaucracy and the funding flexibility limit the capacity to fund health service delivery fully. The different capabilities of non-government actors and cultures also, on the one hand, become incentives for collaboration and, on the contrary, may invite distrust. Moreover, the disparity of health systems, particularly health workers and health facilities, appear as obstacles during disaster response. In addition, disaster management capabilities, such as the strong relationship among various institutions to support medical and non-medical logistics, increase disaster response speed. Although the government has encouraged collaboration and disaster management has provided a formal path of cooperation and information, the relationship between actors (government and non-government institutions) is not entirely harmonious and affects power and conflict during the process of providing disaster aid.