The study’s starting point is a theoretical one. Disaster and emergency management, the authors contend, behaves as a complex adaptive system: a network of interdependent actors—central and local government agencies, emergency services, Indigenous partners, civil society organizations, and private sector entities—whose roles and relationships shift as hazard conditions evolve. Three properties of such systems matter most for DEM. Self-organization allows actors to reconfigure coordination autonomously, as observed during the 2011 Tōhoku disaster in Japan, where local actors improvised networks after formal command structures collapsed. Nonlinearity means disruptions can propagate in ways that produce consequences disproportionate to their initial cause, a dynamic famously analyzed by Charles Perrow in his work on normal accidents. Emergent behavior, meanwhile, means system performance arises from interactions among actors rather than from prescribed plans, and therefore cannot be fully anticipated or controlled in advance.

These characteristics expose a structural mismatch. Leadership scholarship has evolved from trait-based theories toward relational, situational, and transformational models, yet it has remained anchored within the organizational unit rather than the interorganizational system. Even systems-oriented approaches such as meta-leadership and complexity leadership theory retain a largely leader-centric orientation, privileging the individual actor as the primary locus of control. The limitations of that orientation are visible in disaster history: post-event analyses of Hurricane Katrina identified failures of individual leadership alongside structural fragmentation, unclear cross-agency mandates, and inadequate mechanisms for aligning distributed actors toward shared objectives. The 2010 Haiti earthquake similarly showed how leadership capacity interacted with pre-existing institutional weakness and fragmented international coordination.

To fill this gap, the researchers turned to stewardship theory, which emerged as a counterpoint to agency theory’s assumption that actors are self-interested and require monitoring and incentives to perform. Stewardship instead conceptualizes actors as fundamentally motivated to pursue collective goals when organizational identification and value alignment are strong. Extended to the system level, stewardship becomes a form of meta-governance—concerned with shaping a system’s goals, rules, feedback, and response—rather than with directing operational activity. The concept has been applied in natural resource governance, public health system management, and complexity-informed public policy, but had not been systematically examined within DEM, despite the field’s combination of distributed authority, multi-agency interdependence, and nonlinear hazard environments.

The empirical work employed constructivist networked grounded theory, a methodology combining Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory with social network analysis to examine both the relational structure of the DEM system and practitioners’ experiences within it. Data were collected between August 2024 and June 2025 from participants recruited across national forums, professional networks, emergency services, territorial authorities, civil society organizations, and private sector actors. Interviews ranged from 43 to 96 minutes, with a mean of approximately 60 minutes, and analysis proceeded through iterative coding, constant comparison, and progressive category refinement until theoretical saturation was reached. Notably, stewardship was not a predetermined analytical construct; it emerged inductively as the integrative category explaining how participants understood coherence, legitimacy, learning, and adaptive coordination to be sustained across organizational boundaries.

Four interdependent themes emerged from the analysis. The first concerned governing a distributed system. Participants described uncertainty about who holds overarching responsibility for the system as a whole, with national oversight perceived as bounded to particular hazards rather than extending across the full breadth of interagency coordination. Recurrent misalignment between nationally designed arrangements and local operational realities was a persistent friction, sharpened by the fact that national guidance, absent legislative force, cannot be required to be followed. Participants also described ambiguity about which actors were recognized as legitimate contributors to the system, with the operational network extending well beyond formally prescribed structures.

The second theme centered on trust and inclusive participation as the relational infrastructure of coordination. Participants emphasized that the quality of pre-existing relationships was a more reliable predictor of coordination effectiveness than formal arrangements or statutory roles—one practitioner quipped that you need to build a relationship over eight cups of coffee before you can start asking for something. Civil society organizations were described as providing relational networks and community intelligence that are substantial but underrecognized within formal system definitions. Indigenous partnership emerged as a distinct dimension: under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, signed in 1840, Māori hold an enduring basis for partnership in governance, and participants described how the quality of that engagement directly shaped both the legitimacy and operational reach of the system, though Treaty-based partnership quality varied significantly across regions.

The third theme addressed information sharing and learning. The aspiration of a common operating picture was widely referenced but characterized as aspirational rather than operational—one participant observed that the only common thing about it is the word common. Incompatible information systems, platform fragmentation, and institutional protectiveness over data combined to produce what the authors call a feedback deficit: a system theoretically capable of shared sensemaking but operationally fragmented along institutional boundaries. Compounding this, insights gained through events and exercises were described as fading as urgency declined and personnel changed, leaving institutional memory residing in individuals rather than organizational systems and rendering learning sporadic rather than cumulative.

The fourth theme concerned sustaining capability and legitimacy over the long term. Resourcing was described as unevenly distributed, with reliance on locally generated ratepayer revenue producing what participants called a postcode lottery of capability, where organizational capacity reflects local financial circumstances rather than hazard exposure or statutory obligation. Workforce sustainability emerged as a significant concern, with 31 of 40 participants describing burnout, illness, recruitment delays, inconsistent professional standards, and the absence of any centralized repository for qualifications or competency requirements. Accountability, meanwhile, was described as diffuse, operating primarily through post-event inquiry rather than ongoing assurance of preparedness and coordination quality.

From these findings, the authors distill a three-pillar framework of system stewardship. Relational stewardship encompasses the trust, boundary-spanning networks, and inclusive participation through which coordination becomes possible, including sustained investment in Treaty-based partnerships with iwi and the formalization of relationships into organizational arrangements rather than individual positions. Informational stewardship covers shared situational awareness, data transparency, and feedback-informed learning, requiring both technical investment in compatible information management and cultural change that treats learning as a shared system function. Institutional stewardship concerns equitable resourcing, workforce capability, and accountability mechanisms that sustain capability and legitimacy over time. Crucially, the three pillars are interdependent: weakness in one degrades the others, while alignment across all three creates the conditions for sustained adaptive performance. Trust facilitates information sharing; shared understanding strengthens institutional confidence; equitable resourcing enables the sustained engagement through which relationships are built.

The practical implications are considerable. For national agencies, stewardship implies a reorientation of the governance function—from setting requirements to cultivating conditions, from assuring compliance to strengthening capability. For policymakers, the framework makes visible the structural interdependencies between funding, professional standards, and accountability mechanisms, demonstrating that reforms to any single dimension in isolation are unlikely to produce durable improvement. The authors caution that the conditions underpinning system stewardship should not be assumed to persist indefinitely; trust, shared learning, institutional legitimacy, and collaborative relationships require continual investment and renewal, and may be eroded by organizational change, resource constraints, and competing priorities. The study’s limitations are acknowledged: findings derive from a single national context, reflect participant interpretations rather than direct observation, and capture a single point in time, though the framework forms part of a cumulative research program. Ultimately, the study argues that strengthening disaster and emergency management requires moving beyond episodic leadership during events toward the deliberate, continuous stewardship of the relational, informational, and institutional conditions through which adaptive coordination, collective learning, and long-term system coherence are cultivated and sustained.

Subject of Research: System stewardship as a complex adaptive system governance framework for disaster and emergency management in Aotearoa New Zealand

Article Title: Stewardship for Disaster and Emergency Management: A Complex Adaptative System Governance Framework

Article References: Miller, T., Le De, L., & Hore, K. (2026). Stewardship for Disaster and Emergency Management: A Complex Adaptative System Governance Framework. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 17(4), 725-738. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-026-00762-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13753-026-00762-6

Keywords: disaster and emergency management, system stewardship, complex adaptive systems, meta-governance, governance framework, adaptive coordination, Aotearoa New Zealand, trust and collaboration, institutional memory, emergency management workforce, Māori partnership, disaster risk science