Dismantling boundaries between citizen preparedness initiatives and emergency authorities

In the first few weeks of 2019 the suburb of Jyllinge in Roskilde Municipality, Denmark, experienced no less than three storm surge warnings issued by the Danish Meteorological Institute. Even though the hazard did not materialize in all three events extensive preparations were done. One citizen on a social media has dubbed this situation “storm surge fitness” as the work entails heavy manual labour, and seemed to regular excersice. 54 Given the current agenda of co-creation of welfare services such as emergency management (Beredskabsstyrelsen, 2017) this case is a key-case to draw experience from regarding the integration of unaffiliated and official response in Denmark. It covers a development from unprepared citizens not contributing to the official response to very prepared citizens being highly integrated in official response accumulating experience alongside the authorities. Authorities and citizen action groups did the above-mentioned preparation together, with designated citizens participating in staff meetings and operational decisions and citizen working teams operating on their own but under the leadership of the authorities. This is an example of a well-orchestrated cooperation between authorities and unaffiliated volunteers. This cooperation performs integrated response using local knowledge and encompassing converging spontaneous volunteers without any affiliation with the local area, local organisations or emergency authorities. The development that has led to this situation is explored and the ways citizens and authorities establish cooperation, which Johansson et al calls boundary spanning (Johansson, Danielsson, Kvarnlöf, Eriksson, & Karlsson, 2018) is analysed based on interviews with key actors and data gathered from relevant social media. This boundary spanning has developed through repeated experience which has been seen to develop a sort “routine spontaneity” with similarities to the “repeat emergent” Student Volunteer Army of the Canterbury earthquakes (Carlton & Mills, 2017). The repeated experience consists of an actual or warned storm surge in nearly every stormy season since 2013, where the community had no storm-surge preparedness measures. Through experience, the citizens have moved from being the recipients of the official response to being part of this response.