Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

5. Building Resilience Macrodynamic Constraints on Governmental Response to Crises

84 5 Building Resilience Macrodynamic Constraints on Governmental Response to Crises Alasdair Roberts The Macrodynamics of Resilience When societies suffer substantial losses as the result of some calamity, it is natural to wonder whether the harm might have been avoided and how similar harms can be avoided in the future. In this volume, the problem is expressed in terms of societal resilience—that is, the capacity of communities to rebound after unanticipated shocks or at least to “fail gracefully,” with a slow degradation of essential functions (Wildavsky 1988, 77; Boin and Smith 2006, 301). The question, then, is how communities acquire the quality of resilience. There is a strong temptation to regard the improvement of resilience as a problem in engineering (see chapter 2 of this volume). We can think of this both literally and metaphorically. In many instances, communities do enhance their resilience by building better infrastructure—such as earthquake -proof buildings, floodwalls, or emergency radio systems. This is engineering in the literal sense. In addition, though, we seek to design and implement policies that dictate how organizations and individuals will behave in moments of crisis. This is engineering in the metaphorical sense. Once it is expressed in this way, we can see that attempts to improve resilience are susceptible to the same complaint that is lodged against many other efforts at “social engineering.” That is, we may greatly overestimate the ease with which organizational and individual behavior can be changed. Societies (including their governmental systems) are highly Building Resilience 85 complex; in some respects deeply resistant to change; and in other respects shaped by long-term trends that are difficult to resist. Attempts to design policies that do not accommodate these realities are likely to fail or to produce wholly unexpected results (Merton 1936). This point can be put more positively. A proper understanding of the reasons why governmental systems achieve (or fail to achieve) resilience cannot be attained by looking narrowly at the design of specific policies or at the qualities of particular organizational leaders. This is because there is a set of larger considerations—political, economic, cultural, and technological —that defines the set of feasible policies and heavily constrains the range of possible actions available to even the most talented leaders. It is necessary to build a way of explaining resilience that accommodates the operation of these larger forces, which have been elsewhere described as the “macrodynamics” of institutional development (A. Roberts 2009). This chapter attempts to undertake this sort of analysis in an effort to understand the U.S. federal government’s response to two events that caused profound disruption to American life—the first on September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, D.C.; and the second on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The administration of President George W. Bush was widely criticized for its handling of the response to both crises. The federal government, it was said, had not taken the steps needed to improve the country’s capacity to rebound quickly from such catastrophes. Federal authorities were reproved for their failure to improve coordination among federal civilian agencies or to coordinate properly with state and local agencies; for their failure to invest properly in organizational capacities needed for emergency preparedness and response; and for putting key responsibilities in the hands of ill-qualified officials. In both cases, problems in federal administration contributed to a lack of resilience in the system as a whole: the costs incurred by the systemic shock were unnecessarily large. How do we explain these failures? There was a strong temptation, in the aftermath of both crises, to look for explanations that dwelt heavily on the foibles of particular individuals (such as Michael Brown, the unlucky director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time of Katrina ) or weaknesses in the design of particular policies (such as procedural weaknesses in the Federal Bureau of Investigation prior to the 9/11 attacks). The implication is that simple changes in personnel or policies are likely to yield significant improvements in resilience. But the story is not so simple. The weaknesses in the federal response to these two crises were also con- 86 Alasdair Roberts sequences of the operation of large societal forces that are not easily countered . One of these large trends consists of a dramatic change in the mechanisms by which information about...