Building hazard resilience through collaboration: the role of technical partnerships in areas with hazardous liquid and natural gas transmission pipelines

Abstract

Although long-term planning can be improved by full stakeholder participation that generates consensus, there are some planning problems that lack interest from a large and diverse group of stakeholders. For these low-interest yet substantively important issues, such as hazard mitigation, technical collaboration has been suggested as a precursor to processes that involve full stakeholder participation. However, there has been only limited research evaluating the role of technical collaboration in practice. In this study I analyze how technical collaboration influences hazard mitigation capacity for communities at risk from hazardous liquid and natural gas transmission pipeline accidents. Semistructured interviews were conducted with forty-five emergency managers and planning directors located in the Greensboro-Winston-Salem, North Carolina (USA) metropolitan area whose communities had hazardous liquid and natural gas transmission pipelines. On the basis of these interview data, I classified technical collaborations into three categories: loose alliances, full partnerships, and hierarchically cooperative groups. Using this typology of technical collaboration, I found that the type of collaboration (1) influenced local knowledge about pipelines; (2) impacted how transmission pipeline hazards were addressed within a mitigation agenda; and (3) affected a community's long-term capacity to mitigate pipeline hazards and build resilience against potential disasters. Leadership, access to resources, and continuity of the collaboration affected the function of technical collaborations. The research illustrated the inconsistencies in hazard resilience outcomes produced by the three types of technical collaboration. Collectively, the results illustrate how some planners and emergency managers can overcome deficits in knowledge about transmission pipeline hazards or about hazard mitigation planning tools in order to improve hazard resilience. Practitioners from jurisdictions of various sizes can use this research to facilitate their use of existing relationships to achieve hazard mitigation goals or to address critical issues that may have limited stakeholder support.