ABSTRACT
The 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa has proven a very demanding emergency setting for organizations involved in the international response, given the lack of locally available resources to assess the situation, to develop relevant response strategies and to carry on effective actions in the field. And yet, one could have hoped that the exponential development of preparedness theory and its implementation in public health and emergency organizations in recent years would have found involved institutions ready and up to the task. However, existing capacities actually largely failed to deliver effective actions to deal with such unanticipated catastrophic events. In this context, the chapter looks at the operational deployment of communication experts through the World Health Organization’s Emergency Communication Network (ECN). It posits that, through its particular structure, the network was able to offer valuable support to its deployees during the first few months of the crisis, thus increasing their ability to act in the field – their agency. However, this capacity appears more as an unintended consequence of the organizations’ structure than as the result of explicit organizing activities. In particular, we argue that this property is the outcome of an underformalized aspect of the ECN, which is its loose and flexible structure, as a social network. In this capacity, it provided specific forms of trust and fostered different “species” of social capital, which proved relevant to sustain action in an emergency setting.
