âThe entire field of crisis management is devoted to the development of non- ... âlearning is a day-to-day activity, but it does not often change the core of an ...
Lessons of Disaster Thomas A. Birkland
Chapter 1 – “This book is about the dynamics of policy change after sudden events known as focusing events” pg 1 “Blame fixing is a key feature of causal stories; these stories are important both in agenda setting and in laying the ground work for the selection if alternative policy directions” pg 4 “The entire field of crisis management is devoted to the development of non-normal procedures to respond to non-routine managerial problems. In other words, a disaster is what happens to individuals but a crisis is suffered by an organization, from the government broadly to individual groups” pg 5 “natural disasters are predictable in the sense that we know that a big flood, earthquake, or hurricane will happen somewhere, sometime in the future. The goal of the government is to make responses to disasters routine, reduce strain on the disaster relief and management system, and therefore reduce the likelihood of organizational crisis in the national government” pg 6 “one reason to study the process of learning from disasters is that efforts to learn and to change policy are likely to be accelerated in the wake of major events” pg 7 “the process by which participants use information and knowledge to develop, test, and refine their beliefs is the learning process” pg 8 “people and organizations in which they make decisions are boundedly rational, which means that they seek to make rational decisions within the limits of information gathering and capacity. Saying that humans are boundedly rational does not mean that people cannot improve their decisions, however. Rather, a model of decision making that rests on bounded rationality contains within it the idea that people have a problem solving orientation…[the model] also contains the ability for people to make, correct, and learn from errors” pg 9 “the ultimate goal of social policy learning and political learning is to actually effect change in some tangible way” pg 9 “humans are disproportionate information processors” pg 10 “part of the difficulty in explaining how we learn from disasters lies in the difficulty of developing a model of learning” pg 11
“create organizations to capitalize on the ability of people to work together to seek solutions while seeking to overcome the limitations of individual decision making” pg 12 “learning is a day-to-day activity, but it does not often change the core of an individual’s or interest group’s belief system” pg 14 One type of learning is based on experience and ongoing policy experimentation pg 15 “the most obvious form of learning is lesson drawing” pg 15 “policy failure inspires three different kinds of learning: Instrumental policy learning is learning about the ‘viability if policy interventions or implementation designs… analysis of feedback from implementation and make changes in design that improve performance Social policy learning involves learning about the ‘social construction of a policy or program’. This learning goes beyond simple adjustments in program management to the heart of the problem itself, including attitudes toward program goals and the nature and appropriateness of government action. Social policy learning involves the interplay of ideas about how problems come about and how can they be solved, and is much more likely to engage ideaology and belief systems. Political learning consists of learning about ‘strategy for advocating a given policy idea or problem’. Political learning occurs when advocates and opponents of policy change policy change alter their political and rhetorical strategies and tactics to conform to new information that has entered the political system” pg 1617 “policy change can occur without ideas, but such policy change is not typically the result of careful debate and therefore does not result from learning; instead it is mimicking or copying without learning” pg 20 “it is possible for learning to decay over time” pg 20 Definition of learning: Learning is a process in which individuals apply new information and ideas, or information and ideas elevated on the agenda by a recent event, to policy decisions pg 22
Chapter 2 – “the lessons are already there but elites have to pay attention to them if they are to matter” pg 32 “the question is whether policy change after September 11 reflects evidence of learning, or whether policy change was simply the result of superstitious learning, mimicking, or
merely the desire to ‘do something’ under pressure of events, without proper anlysis and design” pg 49 “[September 11] is consistent with Kingdon’s argument that existing ideas are combined with new problem or new appreciations of problems when windows of opportunity are open” pg 53 → a focusing event causes existing ideas to be implemented and not cause people to actually learn from events. Two points: one, you should be aware of this and try to truly learn and not just implement pre-existing ideas; two, others will rush to implement so always have your policies and ideas ready to implement.
Chapter 3 – “the September 11 attacks fit the definition of a ‘high-consequence/low-probability event’ that my seem unimaginable or difficult to prevent but that deserves considerable effort to prevent because of the magnitude of its consequences” pg 65 → this corresponds to the operational hierarchy “We can conclude from [the data about aviation disasters] that events have very little influence on the types of sources sought out and cited by journalists” pg 77 …”the result in the application of standard journalistic scripts in airline disasters…[aviation disasters] events get retold as essentially the same story from year to year” pg 79 “Policy domains without publics include those that entail ‘limited development of groups surrounding issues – usually limited to technical and scientific communities” pg 79 “ideas (including aviation disaster issues) are debated by participants in a policy domain to advance their preferred problem definition” pg 85 “Hilgartner and Bosk argue that agenda setting involves the competition of various issues in a particular institutional venue, Lawrence and Birkland argue that various definitions of the same problem will vie for attention” pg 86 With respect to September 11: “instrumental learning is quite clear after September 11: It was clear that a primary policy tool-security screening by private contractors-had failed… Social learning was enhanced by knowledge that hijackers are likely to be suicidal and fanatical, and not ‘rational’ in the way that we previously believed ‘rationale’ to be… Political actors learned that they could use the consequences of failure to learn from events” pg 93 “has a lesson really been learned if it has not been implemented?” pg 96
“students of policy process have found that the implementation stage is often where attention drops off and problems arise that diminish the high hopes that accompany the passage of legislation” pg 96 “the urge to do something, anything is often quite strong after focusing events” pg 97
Chapter 4 – “promoting mitigation is challenging in part because it is a relatively new aspect of disaster policy, although research has long promoted mitigation as a means of protecting lives and property” pg 106 → mitigation is a very important idea in natural disaster policy which can be applied to other issues. Mitigation does not get enough attention in natural disasters and will likely not get enough attention in other arenas either. “dies aster declarations are profoundly political in that they provide the executive branch and Congress with opportunities to distribute federal aid” pg 107 “Once reconstruction [after hurricanes and earthquakes] is underway, people tend to lose interest in mitigation, leaving technical experts to attempt, with varying levels of success, to keep the issue on the agenda. Their challenge is compounded by the absence of a social movement galvanized by the threat of natural disasters” pg 110 “in short, interest in mitigation is institutionalized in the community of professionals who deal with disasters, but not more broadly in sate and local government” pg 110 “there was little relationship between mitigation planning and actual mitigation projects” pg 111 “an important assumption of this study is that natural hazards are national problems but that local governments are best able to respond and take steps to mitigate them” pg 129 Definition: direct learning – evidence that a state has changed its policy in the basis of what it learned from a disaster – pg 130 With regard to earthquakes in California: “instrumental learning: policy makes learn better ways to mitigate [earthquake] hazards… Social policy learning in CA involved learning about how the earthquake hazard is constructed and understood” pg 135 In the case of hurricane policy, “a building code is only as strong as its enforcement” pg 144
“when residents have direct experience with flooding…they are more likely to take whatever mitigation steps they deem necessary, including building the structure to a higher level than required by local or state law” pg 150 “In North Carolina there is evidence of instrumental policy learning, but such learning is more a product of the accumulation of experience in North Carolina and other states then the result of one individual event” pg 151 “experience had to accumulate before aggressive action was ultimately taken” pg 152 “in the end, learning in the field of natural hazards is a function of experience, both in the actions of professionals whose training and expertise compel their involvement in policymaking and in political leaders who weigh the political costs and benefits of applying lessons to actual policy” pg 156
Chapter 5 – “[Hurricane Katrina] helps us understand how lessons get “unlearned”. Hurricane Katrina, like other disasters, is an example of the difference between a lesson “observed” and a lesson ‘learned’” pg 159 “The paradox of learning driven by truly large events is that whereas such events provide significant fodder for learning, they are also likely to overwhelm the ability of the system to respond with routine procedures and therefore may limit learning” pg 162 “Rather, a focusing event itself, without the intervention of interest groups, causes the same actors that dominate policymaking before the event to consider ideas more intensively than they did before” pg 165 “Instead, focusing events tend to reinvigorate attention to preexisting ideas” pg 165 “What is not entirely clear from this study is to what extent ideas about the causes of problems (which lead to social policy learning) or ideas about policy tools (which lead to instrumental policy learning) would be generated without the mobilization of groups or individual “inside” advocates” pg 171-2 “A focusing event promotes learning because people are motivated to address the problems revealed by the event” pg 173 “The results of this study suggest that media attention, particularly the highly salient issues, promotes learning. Organizational features of the policy domain will promote or inhibit learning. Domains in which ideas for improved policy have accumulated over time are more likely to show evidence of instrumental learning than are those domains in which this experience does not accumulate” pg 173 “Change by itself is not evidence of learning from an event” pg 175
Two impediments to learning: “the first is ‘confusion over what it takes to improve policy performance’ ” “the second is a situation where ‘knowledge for improving policy performance exists, but policy makers are constrained by political or other factors in their abilities to incorporate such change in policy redesign’ “ pg 177 “But not all focusing events teach policymakers the ‘right’ lessons” pg 178 “the research outlined in this book could thus be extended to consider what we might call event-related policy implementation. This type of policy implementation might work in two ways. In one case we would see the implementation of a new policy triggered by an event – for example, the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, a clear outgrowth of the September 11 attacks. In another case we would see a renewed effort to implement an existing policy that had been inadequately enforced – for example, increased vigilance by airport security officials in passenger screening. Experience shows that this kind of vigilance will decay over time as memories of the triggering event fade and as events in other policy domains have spillover effects. In both cases cumulative experience in important to shaping implementation processes and outcomes. It may take multiple attempts before policy change is achieved” pg 182 “DHS policies and programs violated two fundamental principles of emergency management. First, both social science research and emergency management practice have long emphasized the value of using an ‘all hazards’ approach…meaning that communities and other governmental levels should assess their vulnerabilities, focus generally on tasks that must be performed regardless of event type, and then plan for specific contingencies, guided by risk-based assessments of what could happen. Second…emergency management research and practice have emphasized that is termed ‘comprehensive emergency management’, or the notion that loss-reduction efforts should be carried out in an integrated way across different time phases of extreme events” pg 186-7 “research could certainly develop a set of criteria for what the lesson of a given event should be, and could the assess whether those lessons are learned and are applied to better policy” pg 189
