ABSTRACT
This chapter traces horizontal sources of authority informed by local expertise. In the case of emergency management collaboration, members asserted local understanding as a rationale for their decision-making, and in the process framed both the local situation and their local knowledge as having authority. The chapter uses vignettes to demonstrate how local knowledge and experience came into play in bids for authority; however, not all local knowledge was equally valued, leading to an emergent hierarchy among collaborative members with first-responder agencies at the top. In the context of the post-9/11 US security state, horizontal forms of authority were used to assert local knowledge and priorities as important to the collaboration's trajectory. Even though vertical forms of authority appear to have a stronghold on risk collaborations like emergency management, interorganizational collaboration makes present more horizontal forms of authority due to the lack of formal organizing structure in collaborations.
