Despite highly specialised and capable emergency management systems, ordinary citizens
are usually first on the scene in an emergency or disaster, and remain long after official …

Spontaneous responses by self-organizing,“emergent” voluntary groups and individuals are
a common feature of urban disasters. Their activities include search and rescue, transporting …

As is well known for decades, citizens are highly resilient during and after a disaster, they
save the day by helping themselves and others. A relatively new phenomenon is the …

There is a growing expectation that volunteers will have a greater role in disaster
management in the future compared to the past. This is driven largely by a growing focus on …

Studying the so-called refugee crisis in Germany, this article asks about the effectiveness of
crisis management by a large number of local administrations, each acting upon the same …

In the response of the flood disaster in Germany 2021 a vast number of spontaneous
volunteers (SVs) participated. They organized coordinating services, developed emergent …

What characterizes civil disaster response in the digital age? In a growing number of cases,
citizens use social media platforms to self‐organize and carry out tasks in emergencies that …

The adoption of location-based information sharing technologies, and the emergence of
volunteered geographic information (VGI), has seen changes to community involvement in …

Informal volunteering is increasingly important in disaster management, but authorities
remain cautious about collaborating with informal volunteers. Relatively little is known about …

In the present article, practices of inclusion of different types of volunteers in the response to
a large‐scale forest fire in Sweden are studied. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted …