Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

6. Federal Disaster Policy Learning, Priorities, and Prospects for Resilience

106 6 Federal Disaster Policy Learning, Priorities, and Prospects for Resilience Thomas A. Birkland Policy Learning and Community Resilience This chapter considers the extent to which federal-level “learning” from disaster experience yields policy changes that enhance disaster resilience at the local level. There is evidence of learning from experience at the state and federal levels after major natural disasters (Birkland 2006); that is, disaster policy changes and in some ways improves based on disaster experience . However, certain conditions must be in place for successful policy learning, which do not always exist (Gerber 2007). While learning and the capacity for learning might be considered essential aspects of effective disaster policy, I argue that the lessons that are generally learned are not intentionally designed to enhance community disaster resilience and indeed have had little effect in improving resilience. Even if we settle for more readily assessed aspects of policy—hazard mitigation and disaster preparedness—we still cannot find evidence that resilience occupies many federal policy makers’ attention. The overwhelming evidence suggests that most learning has been about the instrumental and political aspects of the quick and generous delivery of disaster relief. Federal and state policies promoting hazard mitigation and disaster preparedness may have the incidental effect of promoting resilience, but even if these policies were explicitly designed to improve resilience, these aspects of disaster policy are such relatively minor parts of federal and most states’ policies that in the best case their influence on local resilience would be minimal. Federal Disaster Policy 107 In reality, national policy tends to undermine resilience because of its centralizing tendencies—“the feds know best” tendency—and because of its continued focus on disasters after the fact, in the form of sometimes massive amounts of federal aid that constitutes little but pork-barrel spending (Platt 1999), while continuing to encourage development in areas most prone to hazards (Burby 2006; Burby et al. 1999; Burby and Dalton 1994). This lack of attention to resilience and even to mitigation has become more pronounced in the “homeland security” era, in which the federal government has sought to centralize disaster policy under a command-and-control mode (Scavo, Kearney, and Kilroy 2006) that is antithetical to what science has learned about how people, communities, institutions, and the built environment behave in disasters. Because preparedness and mitigation are more familiar terms of art than resilience (the meaning of which remains contested, at least at the margins), I use mitigation and preparedness as proxies for policies that are more likely to promote community and regional resilience than are relief policies that have been demonstrated to undermine efforts to promote resilience. I will show that the federal government and Congress, in particular, devote less of their attention to mitigation and preparedness (i.e., to preimpact policies that may promote resilience) than they do to relief and recovery aid (transand postimpact) (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2006; Quarantelli 1980). I argue that, from a resilience perspective, preparedness and mitigation—particularly “nonstructural” or “process” mitigation (as described below)—are two aspects of disaster policy that are most associated with resilience because they focus on preimpact capacity, while relief and recovery are simply palliatives that may inject some resources into the community, but with the effect of reducing resilience and increasing hazardous behavior (Burby et al. 1999). I further argue, based on a historic analysis of federal policy, that efforts to engage communities in resilience-promoting activities peaked in the late 1990s with the emergence of Project Impact, a community-based mitigation and resilience partnership initiated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), only to be undermined by the Bush Administration ’s gutting of FEMA; this gutting began before the September 11 attacks but accelerated rapidly thereafter. Defining Resilience There are many ways to define and operationalize disaster resilience (Comfort 1994a; Aguirre 2006; Manyena 2006). Resilient social and constructed systems are described in many ways: as being able to “fail gracefully” or as 108 Thomas A. Birkland having “rebound capacity.” The editors of this volume define resilience as the capacity for collective decision making both during and immediately after the onset of a crisis. In this definition, the ability of a community to recover or “bounce back” is the essence of resilience. Researchers at MCEER (formerly the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research) at SUNY Buffalo have developed the idea of a “resilience delta” (MCEER 2006), which reflects the fact that there are many systems in...