Voluntary Organization in Disaster Management

When large-scale emergencies or disasters occur, individuals often gather at the incident site to offer their help as volunteers. In Sweden large-scale emergencies have been rare. This means that there are few Swedish studies of the role of volunteers in disaster response. Regarding the integration of volunteers in the overall disaster response organization, studies are few even in an international perspective. In this research project the degree to which volunteers are integrated in disaster response, and how this integration is achieved, is studied. The disaster studied is the large forest fire in Västmanland. Three types of voluntary actors are studied: (1) Established voluntary organizationa, (2) so-called emergent groups that are formed ´spontaneously´ during the disaster response, and (3) unorganized individuals. These actors are characterised by different degrees of organization (from formal organizations to unorganized individuals). To integrate them in the overall disaster response organization is a way of increasing the overall degree of organization, thereby decreasing the degree of uncertainty in the disaster management. However, the three different kinds of voluntary actors cannot be integrated by the same managerial strategies. How this kind of integration is accomplished has hardly been studied.