Emergent Leadership in Extreme Events: A Knowledge Commons for Sustainable Communities

Extreme events create extraordinary demands on public managers, particularly at national and international scales of operation. The rapid escalation of demand in contexts of urgent need, scarce resources, and cascading, interdependent consequences challenges the physical, intellectual, technical, and social skills of public managers in profound ways, with high potential for failure at sobering costs. We examine this process of evolving leadership in two different disaster contexts, Haiti and Japan, and conclude that developing a “knowledge commons” or interactive information infrastructure offers a constructive means of improving decision processes for public managers by engaging a wider exchange of knowledge and skills in situations of deep uncertainty. Timely, valid information becomes the key resource in mobilizing collective action in response to disaster in both developed and developing countries.