Dynamic capabilities of public sector organisations: A case study of forest and land fires in Indonesia

Abstract

This article presents findings from a longitudinal study on decentralisation in disaster management. The 2015 regional disasters exposed a fundamental incapacity in local crisis management, compelling the central government to reassume control of a system that had been formally decentralised since 2007. When fires recurred in 2019, the regional government had developed partial institutional responses, yet remained unable to fully initiate an independent crisis response, revealing that decentralisation had transferred authority without transferring capability. This study applies Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework, operationalised through the pillars of sensing, seizing, and transforming, to explain why this gap persists. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with key actors during the crisis and post-disaster periods, triangulated with official government archives and local media documentation. The findings offer three theoretical contributions that extend Teece’s framework for public-sector applications. Firstly, a learning phase is identified as a necessary precondition for dynamic capabilities to form in organisationally immature, decentralised systems. Secondly, an asymmetric-substitutional pattern is observed, in which macro-level policy advances consistently outpace operational capacity at the field level. Thirdly, the study introduces networked dynamic capability.
Contribution: This study describes the process or evolution that resulted in public organisations specifically disaster management, using a decentralised system. Disaster decentralisation cannot occur immediately if the public organisation is not prepared, and transformation only occurs after a crisis occurs.