Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

11. The Limits of Self-Reliance International Cooperation as a Source of Resilience

196 11 The Limits of Self-Reliance International Cooperation as a Source of Resilience Mark Rhinard and Bengt Sundelius In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Katrina caused severe and catastrophic damage. In addition to ripping homes open and destroying power lines in Mississippi and Louisiana , the storm breached two levees in the city of New Orleans (Seed et al. 2005). Water flooded 80 percent of the city, adding to the destruction and contributing to the deaths of over thirteen hundred residents (Cooper and Block 2006). Equally troubling was the way U.S. authorities handled the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. A slow and uncoordinated response compounded infrastructure damage and added to the suffering, in turn impairing the ability of New Orleans and other cities along the Gulf Coast to manage a major crisis effectively. Concern was expressed by observers not only within the United States but also from abroad: the international community took part in an unprecedented “role reversal” (Richard 2006a) as foreign governments pledged almost one billion dollars in cash, supplies, equipment, and in-kind services to help save lives and property. Some of that aid reached its target destination, but much of it did not. Dutch water engineers worked efficiently in repairing broken pumping stations to drain several New Orleans parishes. Canadian Mounties and search-and-rescue teams interacted seamlessly with their U.S. counterparts to provide much-needed assistance. And the Mexican Navy took a large role in clearing out harbors to make way for incoming supply ships. By contrast, The Limits of Self-Reliance 197 Swedish mobile telecommunications systems, which could have quickly replaced downed emergency call systems, never reached their target, while United Kingdom ready-to-eat meals were stored in deep freezers despite urgent need. French doctors were turned back at Louisiana airports because they lacked U.S. credentials. Austrian disaster-response experts never received flight clearance because of communication errors (Richard 2006a; Reuters 2005). These latter cases represent a set of cooperation failures and an absence of established United Nations protocol for managing humanitarian assistance . Although clear policy and procedures exist for managing international cooperation among member states of the United Nations under the Organization for Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance, these procedures were not followed, by either the United States or the nations offering assistance. This policy requires the afflicted nation to request assistance from the United Nations, after which the secretary general issues a call to member nations for specific types of assistance (United Nations 1991). Since the United States did not request assistance from the United Nations to meet disaster needs, it did not set in motion any mechanisms for receiving or managing contributions from other nations. The inability of U.S. government agencies to cooperate with foreign governments over the provision of much-needed humanitarian assistance compounded the problems in response operations, exacerbated the suffering of victims, and hampered the ability of stricken areas to bounce back from a major crisis. In this chapter, we argue that the capacity to cooperate across borders is an important precondition for resilience. Whether we speak of cities, regions, or nations, today’s complex crises (of which Hurricane Katrina is an example) can easily outstrip the coping capacities of a single social system . The capacity to draw in necessary resources from outside a particular political-legal jurisdiction, and to incorporate and deploy these, is an essential source of resilience. To build this argument, we first establish the relationship between international cooperation and resilience, showing how effective cooperation pays dividends in terms of resource distribution, policy coordination, and sensemaking —each an important part of a social system’s ability to bounce back from major disturbances. To explain what factors underpin a system’s “cooperation capacity,” we draw on cooperation studies in three different disciplines —international relations, organizational studies, and social psychology —to outline factors that relate to the interest-based, institution-based, and ideas-based components of successful cooperation. The large number of cooperation attempts in the Hurricane Katrina 198 Mark Rhinard and Bengt Sundelius response effort, some resulting in success and others in failure, allows us to examine whether the presence of these factors may correlate with outcomes .1 Future application of this framework could be applied to more familiar examples of international cooperation in disaster relief, such as those related to developing countries accepting aid from abroad. The disasters caused by the...