There are several reasons why voluntarism is important
to emergency preparedness. First, in certain areas of activity, it can
compensate for lack of official resources. Secondly, it can help connect the
official response mechanism to the beneficiaries, namely the general public.
Thirdly, it may give people more of a stake in how local risks are managed.
Finally, it may help create a sense of community and encourage people to work
for the common good.
Voluntarism can help to connect ordinary people to the
system of official disaster risk reduction and emergency response. It can
counteract the ‘top-down’ effect, with its potential blindness to local
concerns and priorities. It can also help adapt emergency provisions to local
needs. In this context, organised voluntarism can act as a link between
salaried administrators and the general public, enabling the latter to connect
with the emergency preparedness process and voice concerns to the authorities.
It is often suggested that voluntarism is in crisis in
various parts of the world. The market-based ideologies of neoliberal
capitalism have encouraged, promoted and prized individualism at the expense of
selfless collective action. Harsh economic conditions and the rise of the ‘gig
economy’ have created financial pressures that discourage people from
volunteering, as this would be too great a sacrifice of time that could be
spent earning a basic income. Public discourse has become harsher, and civil
values have taken a beating. Nevertheless, charity, self-sacrifice and social
participation have found new ways of expressing themselves, notably with the
aid of social media. In one of her Christmas addresses to the UK nation, Queen
Elizabeth II observed that, among the many people she has met during the course
of her official duties, the happiest and most fulfilled have usually been those
who sought a role helping others. Hence, voluntarism is certainly not dying and
doubtless has a rich, varied future ahead of it.
This essay briefly examines (or really re-examines -
see Alexander 2010) the nature of civil protection voluntarism. This largely
means emergency response, although there is of course a role for volunteers in
the wider processes of mitigating risks and preparing for future emergencies.
In this work, the key question is how best to organise voluntarism so that it
provides a valid and valuable service, motivates the volunteers and fits in
with the ‘official’ system. As the legal, administrative and social support
systems of countries vary widely, no one model is appropriate everywhere. There
is a series of options to be considered, as the following section will show.
The nature of
civil protection voluntarism
According to sociologists, agent-generated demands arise from the specific nature of the
hazard or threat impact and response-generated
demands stem from the process of organising and implementing the response
(Quarantelli 1982, p. 3). Hence, the need for casualty management is
agent-generated, but the need for stretchers and ambulances is
response-generated. Volunteers respond to the former category of needs but
generate the latter category.
The first question for civil protection authorities is
whether it is better to avail themselves of spontaneous volunteers or create
the conditions for organised, incorporated voluntarism. Although there are pros
and cons on both sides of the dilemma, the world-wide trend is decisively away
from spontaneous voluntarism in favour of the organised kind. This, however,
may be a process or path, rather than a net distinction.
Spontaneous volunteer forces have been organised by
enterprising citizens through use of social media to articulate people’s
pressing concerns. Thus people with brooms and plastic sacks went out on the
streets of London after the 2011 riots both to clean up the debris and to
demonstrate that Londoners still have civic values of tolerance, solidarity and
participation. In 2014, similar forces were out on the streets of Hamilton,
Ontario, to clean up the debris left by the passage of an intense storm.
In Italy, organised voluntarism in civil protection
stems from the founding of the Venerable Company of the Misericordia in
Florence in 1244. In 2018 it is still in the same headquarters but has grown
into a major ambulance and civil protection response service that is federated
across the nation. Nevertheless, the dawn of the modern era of civil protection
voluntarism in Italy stems from the arrival of many young people in Florence
after the 4 November 1966 floods. Equipped with nothing but a backpack and
bedding role, they dedicated themselves to the clean-up process with enthusiasm
and earned the title of “mud angels”.
Spontaneous demonstrations of desire to help and
participate are all very well, but they carry a number of drawbacks.
Unorganised volunteers can be a drain on resources and are of limited use. Yet
most civil protection voluntary organisations began in this manner. Thus, one
could trace a progression from
spontaneous to fully organised and incorporated voluntarism (see figure).
Hence, in Italy, 3,600 volunteer organisations are the backbone of the system.
The organisations have government sponsorship and their members are protected
with legal provisions. For example, they cannot be sacked from their regular
jobs if they are called upon to respond to a disaster.
It is a valid hypothesis that voluntarism in civil protection
cannot adequately be organised on an unprogrammed basis. Some of the reasons
for this are as follows. First, members require personal protection in their
response roles and insurance against accident, liability or losses. The
complexity of events and increasing professionalism of roles requires
systematic training. Volunteers work best in groups or organisations and these
need to be accommodated by the system of official emergency response. In fact,
given the need to orchestrate the response, it is important for such
organisations to have defined roles that can fully be taken into account in
emergency plans. Moreover, such roles must harmonise with other roles and tasks
in such a way as to cover all anticipated needs generated by foreseeable emergency
situations.
The process of building a system of volunteer
organisations that is both parallel to the official response system and is
harmonised with it involves a series of steps. Associations need to be formed
and to acquire identity based on their tasks, roles and constituent members.
Association involves working together; organisation involves grouping and
readying for action. Training, the acquisition of equipment and operational
bases, the formation of communications networks and the creation of procedures
for recruitment are all part of the process of maturing and developing
organisations. They may then enter on the path to incorporation, in which they
gain official recognition and absorption into official structures, with an
official role in emergency response or other civil protection activities.
Models of
voluntarism in civil protection
When considering how voluntarism could be developed in
civil protection, the first question to answer is what can volunteers do? Here
is a list of possible roles:
- urban search and rescue (USAR), regional search and rescue (SAR)
- marine rescue (lifeboat services)
- evacuation and the management of temporary shelter
- mass feeding for displaced populations and emergency responders
- transportation and humanitarian logistics
- ambulance service, with paramedics and possibly doctors
- volunteer fire service
- medical services, support for people with disabilities, psychological assistance
- interpreting and translating
- building and construction skills
- monitoring, observing and providing information to the public.
In most countries there are probably already volunteer
organisations that respond to with some of these needs.
In some countries emergency response voluntarism is
well developed. In Germany, for example, Technisches Hilfswerk (THW) has almost
80,000 volunteers and 630 bases. It is well integrated into the official
emergency response system. In Italy, there are 3,600 volunteer organisations
with civil protection roles, some of which are federated into 36 national organisations.
The volunteer rescue tradition stretches back 775 years and is fully accepted
and well supported by local communities. It is usually a matter of local pride,
as well as the prudence of having functional emergency services at close
proximity. A corollary is the fact that Italian Law (specifically no. 225 of
1992) identifies the elected mayor of a municipality as the chief civil
protection authority, which is a further connection between the official
emergency response mechanism and the beneficiaries in the general population.
Similar kinds of organisation exist in countries such as Colombia, but with
lower levels of development, in part due to lack of resources and in part
because of the persistence of conflict situations that have restricted the development
of civilian agencies (Salamon and Sokolowski 2001).
In the United States individualism is such that
volunteer activity is somewhat limited, although the American Red Cross is a
fine example of how a regular institution can be integrated with volunteers. In
the more seismically active parts of California there have been experiments
with organising neighbourhood-level emergency response, by training and
equipping groups of neighbours (Lichterman 2000). In southern Ireland, villages
have organised to be resilient against emergencies using social media to
communicate and identify indigenous skills.
Voluntarism and
communities
The concept of ‘community’ is difficult to define and
not necessarily therapeutic. In the first place, it has no inherent scale, It
can be conceptualised as any grouping of people with a common agenda, or common
fate, from the level of a single inhabited street to that of the entire world,
as linked by information technology. Many local communities have expatriate
elements, perhaps in the form of a diaspora. Secondly, the mere fact of a
common destiny, or common interests, does not automatically make communities a
force for social progress. Rather than being therapeutic phenomena, many
communities are factional, divided by rivalries or subject to ‘elite capture’,
a process in which the common agenda is subverted to the desires of the most
influential or powerful members of the community (Lund and Saito-Jensen 2013).
Although elite capture is mostly associated with communities in developing
countries it is equally likely to occur in rich nations, albeit under a
different, more subtle guise.
Despite these reservations, where they can be defined
at a local scale, communities are usually rich in human capital (Becker 1994).
People have skills and experience, as well as potential commitment. Organising
volunteer groups is thus also a question of organising expertise in such a way
that it can be exploited in emergency response or mitigation actions.
Another issue concerns how to use existing volunteer
organisations, if there are such things, in order to extend their reach to
emergency response activities. In the local community, there may be trained
figures (such as flood wardens and snow wardens) as well as entire trained
organisations. An ambitious scheme would operate at the national or regional
level. It would provide a legal framework for operations, including coverage
for anticipated risks, funding for equipment and training, and recognition and
accommodation within the official system. Once established, the organisation
could be incorporated into emergency plans with defined roles under expected
emergency scenarios.
Conclusions
Civil protection is made up of the processes and
organisations involved in preparing for and responding to civilian emergencies
such as natural hazard impacts and industrial accidents. To be effective, it
needs the recognition, and perhaps the participation, of the beneficiaries,
namely the general public. In many situations, how to connect the public and
the system is a major challenge. Encouraging and developing organised
voluntarism is one possible way of taking up that challenge.
There is a choice of three possible strategies (which
are not mutually exclusive):-
(a) Rely on spontaneous voluntarism and existing
volunteer organisations. Seek to guide and direct them more effectively. This
means anticipating developments that will occur which may involve volunteers
and predicting both how they can be used and how they will act in a crisis.
(b) Make better use of existing voluntary
organisations. Understand them, engage with them, seek to change and develop
their roles in emergency situations. Seek a better institutional role for them.
(c) Start to develop serious civil protection
organisations and a role, accreditation system and institutional framework for
them. Templates and procedural and legal mechanisms will be needed.
By and large, the development of voluntarism is one of
the possible measures of the maturity of the civil protection system and its
path towards a service that is responsive to local needs and priorities,
organised from above, but activated from below.
References
Alexander, D.E. 2010. The voluntary sector in
emergency response and civil protection: review and recommendations. International Journal of Emergency
Management 7(1): 151-166.
Becker, G.S. 1994. Human capital revisited. In Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical
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Lichterman, J.D. 2000. A "community as
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Lund, J.F. and M. Saito-Jensen 2013. Revisiting the
issue of elite capture of participatory initiatives. World Development 46: 104-112.
Quarantelli, E.L. 1982. Human resources and
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planning. Preliminary paper no. 76. Disaster Research Center, University of
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