Local Governments Navigating Disaster: Capacity, Collaborative Governance, and Disaster Aid Equity

This dissertation investigates the role, institutional capacity, and equity outcomes of local governments within the United States federal emergency management system. Integrating a systematic literature review with longitudinal quantitative analyses of U.S. county-level data, this research examines the dynamics of local disaster management. This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, while existing studies consistently emphasize local importance in disasters, they have largely fragmented the concepts of local capacity, governance, and networked collaboration. Second, prior research on federal disaster assistance has frequently conflated initial access to aid with the magnitude of realized funding, obscuring the structural mechanisms of capacity bias. Third, evaluations of disaster mitigation policy have primarily treated social equity as a single distributive endpoint rather than a multidimensional, stage-based administrative process. This dissertation addresses these gaps.Specifically, this dissertation examines how local government capacity shapes the realization of federal disaster assistance. Rather than treating capacity as a background factor, it highlights how capacity structures the translation of eligibility into actual funding outcomes. It further conceptualizes disaster mitigation equity as a stage-based administrative process, emphasizing that disparities may emerge at different points of program implementation rather than solely in final allocations. By distinguishing between access to aid and the magnitude of funding in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Public Assistance program, and by applying a four-stage social equity framework to the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, the analysis demonstrates how institutional and administrative dynamics influence the distribution of federal resources across policy stages.
Across the U.S. intergovernmental disaster system, the findings reveal three main insights. First, local governments operate not as uniformly dominant actors but as institutionally constrained and relationally embedded coordinators. Second, capacity-driven disparities arise primarily through the differential realization of federal resources rather than exclusion from access, with fiscal and organizational capacity shaping the scale of aid. Third, inequities in disaster mitigation emerge mainly during administrative and distributive stages, as reflected in longer processing times and lower per capita funding, while access and program effectiveness remain largely comparable across communities.