Grey Swans and Ambiguity: Causes of Failure in Natech Risk Collaborative Response Network

Abstract

As a compound risk, Natech exhibits chain, cluster, and concurrent characteristics, accompanied by a certain degree of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and is typically classified as a gray swan. Due to unclear boundaries in scope, time, and space, Natech event response suffers from overlapping responsibilities, unclear authority, and major ambiguity. Establishing an efficient stakeholder collaborative response network remains a critical challenge. This paper introduces the four stages of resilience governance into social network analysis and constructs a dynamic evolutionary framework for the Natech collaborative response network. Taking the flood-triggered Natech events in Chengdu, China, as a case study, based on the emergency response plan text data, we analyzed the dynamics of organizational collaborative response networks across functional, temporal, and spatial domains. The temporal domain was categorized by risk sequence and dynamics to examine cross-time collaboration, the functional domain was delineated via risk coupling and cascading to investigate multidepartmental interactions, and the spatial domain was defined by risk diffusion and propagation to explore multilevel coordination mechanisms. In the Natech complex adaptive networks, the roles and positions of stakeholders are dynamically realigned with scenario shifts, exhibiting adaptive evolution characteristics. We further proposed a “scenario–task–network” framework as the core pathway for adaptive governance, which refines the adaptive driving factors, objectives, and dynamic evolution process of the ambiguous Natech response networks. It provides theoretical foundations for strengthening the management of ambiguity in Natech risks.