As is well known, most emergency incidents are managed by local governments. However, when an incident of disaster-scale occurs, the traditional model of emergency management has certain limitations. Emergency response systems are primarily designed to manage incidents locally, not to facilitate coordination across multiple jurisdictional boundaries. As a result, the threat of a catastrophic terrorist attack and of other regional-scale natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina has led to a policy demand for actual regional coordination in emergency response. In this article, we discuss the local development of regionalism in emergency management and present an approach to assessing the effectiveness of such efforts (i.e., we examine local government conditions conducive to regionalization). We discuss various strategies for assessing the push for regionalism in emergency management, including providing several regional integration performance indicators and an outline of the importance of combining assessment strategies in this area. Our results suggest that local capacity for regionalization, just as in other areas of emergency management, is largely determined by unique local characteristics, thus presenting a challenge to new policy doctrine.

disasters, emergency management, emergency response, regional coordination