Actors in the real world are affected by multiple relations, and therefore, so are actions in the web of collaboration.As such, it is crucial to take account of these multiple, intertwined relations when evaluating any networkconstituted by various types of cooperative and collaborative activity: For example, the collaborativedecision-making carried out in municipal disaster preparedness and management. Occupying the front line ofdisaster management, municipal governments rely on multiple actors and a variety of resources in their efforts torespond swiftly and effectively;and how well such an organization assembles these various aspects of itscollaborations will determine how robust its organizational resilience is. However, collaborative relations are oftenembedded in cross-layer interactions, which makes them hard to perceive, and may lead to blind spots inemergency-planning education and training. By applying social network analysis—specifically, a multiplexnetwork approach—this paper aims to identify and verify the characteristics embedded in the multiplex networkthat delineate collaborative decision-making in a municipal disaster-management setting. Its results show thatdecision-making collaboration among New Taipei’s municipal agencies tasked with disaster preparedness andreduction constitutes a complex multiplex network, containing cross-layer effects derived from trust, resources, anddecision-making interactions. The study concludes that a clear understanding of municipal decision-making in thecontext of disaster preparation and response needs to take account of the multiple dimensions of agencycollaboration and the interdependencies that emerge from those dimensions.
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