A STRATEGIC OVERVIEW OF THE "NEW" EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

> Robert O. Schneider, Ph.D.
>
> Chair-Dept. Political Science and Public Administration
>
> University of North Carolina at Pembroke
>
> INTRODUCTION

With the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the creation of the
Department of Homeland Security, it may be tempting to suggest that
emergency management has attained a new level of significance in the
national consciousness. Indeed, the emergence of the profession and the
creation of FEMA itself owe much to the national defense mania of the
Cold War era. But, if the past is any indication, the national security
concerns that periodically increase public awareness and political
attentiveness to the emergency management function do not result in a
broad commitment of new resources to the full array of natural and
manmade disasters that threaten local communities. Aside from the
increased and targeted attention focused on specific and immediate
security threats, often without new resources being made available to
local governments, the commitment to comprehensive disaster planning and
preparedness is generally lacking. Indeed, it could even be suggested
that the current national security focus holds as much potential to
distract the emergency management profession as it does to increase its
operational scope and effectiveness. But perhaps, if the moment is
seized, the current crisis and any renewed attention it may bring to
emergency management can be an opportunity to recast it as a more vital
and strategic component in the future political landscape of the local
communities it serves.

Important national security concerns aside, the emergency management
profession is presently confronted with the challenge to manage new
realities. The analysis presented herein will maintain that this
requires expanding the role of the emergency management function beyond
its traditional scope. It will also suggest that the emergency manager
will require new skills and that the profession must be identified with
the emergency manager as a proactive public actor as much as it is with
institutions and technical functions. This suggests that political and
organizational analysis, strategic thinking, and leadership may be
increasingly important concepts of study for emergency managers. These
concepts have already been applied to the analysis and implementation of
virtually all other public management functions. They have refocused
administrative and organizational analysis into a prescriptive subject
matter with a decidedly strategic point of view (Wamsley, 1990; Moore,
1995, Lynn, 1996). Emergency management, relatively oblivious to these
developments one might say, is overdue for re-articulation in terms of a
more strategic public administration.

What follows is intended to outline a new conceptual framework for the
emergency management profession and to suggest a basic organizational
theme for its implementation. Essential to this analysis is the
recognition that the limitations and inadequacies of what may be called
the "old emergency management" must be overcome for the profession to
advance. In discussing what may be called the "new emergency
management," it will be argued that the factors that contribute to its
environment and the challenges that shape it require a broader,
strategic, and more proactive orientation for the emergency management
profession.

> THE OLD EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

An examination of emergency management literature suggests that, until
quite recently, the strategic motivation for the emergency management
profession arose from the challenges of responding or reacting to
specific and immediate disasters rather than from the recognition of
opportunities and the implementation of long term planning. It had long
been demonstrated that emergency management issues were of low salience
in most states and communities (Wright and Rossi, 1981; Wolensky and
Wolensky, 1990). In fact, the literature often noted indifference or
outright opposition to disaster preparedness (Kreps, 1991). Public
officials and public administrators in local communities, we were often
told, did not fully comprehend the nature of the emergency management
function. A basic assumption still prevalent is that emergency
management is primarily a "response" function and a concern only for
first responders. Other public officials remain uninvolved and assume
that they need not learn much about the field (Grant, 1996).

The development of the emergency management function at the local level
is a rather recent development and grew out of federal legislation such
as the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act of 1986. But
even with federal mandates assigning more disaster mitigation and
preparedness functions to local governments, emergency management did
not quickly become a priority at the local level. Unless a specific
hazard was more or less immanent, sustained governmental interest and
public support at the local level was difficult to sustain (Perry and
Mushkatel, 1984). Policy makers and stakeholders alike have tended to
underestimate hazard potentials. They have been inclined to see hazard
occurrence as having a low probability and have thus been reluctant to
impose limitations on private property, unwilling to bear the costs of
hazard preparedness, and altogether ambivalent toward hazard mitigation
(Grant, 1996). Emergency management remained a low priority, a resented
un-funded federal mandate, and a responsibility often seen as being
somewhat at odds with more important tasks such as economic development.
These attitudes unfortunately shaped and restrained the early
development of the emergency management profession in local communities
across the country.

From its earliest days, the emergency management function suffered as a
result of low political support and scarce resources. In many local
jurisdictions it became an ad-on or part time responsibility for an
already overburdened local official such as a fire chief. Often the
individuals appointed to local emergency management directorships had
little professional training or experience relevant for the job. As a
result of low salience, poor training, and lack of support, the focus of
the emergency management professional tended to be narrow, disaster
specific, technical, and limited to very specific tasks. This is
beginning to change. It is probably more accurate today to say that the
emergency management function is on its way to becoming a distinct
profession. But there remains a strategic tension that retards the
development of the profession. What is lacking is a dynamic model for
transforming a once limited function into a contemporary public
management role connected to the whole of community life.

Any effort to enhance the professionalism of emergency managers will be
frustrated if it is not connected to a strategic orientation that
broadens the scope and impact of the profession. Many practicing
emergency managers accustomed to the traditional or "old" definition of
their role may resist the suggestion of an expanded view of their role,
but such a transformation is necessary to promote greater productivity
and success in the broader and more strategic environment that shapes
the contemporary work of emergency management.

Like it or not, and even as significant progress is being made in
improving the technical skills of the profession, emergency management
is being relocated in a wider and more dynamic context. More recent
literature in the field is suggesting that emergency management is no
longer confined to preparing for, responding to, or recovery from
specific disasters. Increasingly, emergency management is seen as an
integral part of a more comprehensive community decision-making process.
It is increasingly connected to issues such as environmental
stewardship, community planning, and sustainable development (Britton,
1999). More analysis is being devoted to emergency management as a
component in broader community planning and development activities
(Beatley, 1995; Mileti, 1999). The linkage of hazard mitigation, a new
emphasis in the field, to the broader task of developing sustainable
communities potentially places emergency management at the very heart of
community planning (Schneider, 2002). There is a growing consensus that
the limited, task oriented, technical, and disaster specific orientation
of the old emergency management must be replaced with a broader more
strategic framework for the profession.

Without a new framework and a new strategic approach that connects
emergency management to the broader issues and community concerns noted
above, it will remain in a position of low salience, low stakeholder
support, scarce resources, institutional instability, and limited or
constrained effectiveness. This new framework for emergency management
will require that its operational and technical capacities be linked to
the policy setting and stakeholder support bases of the communities it
serves. Emergency management organizations must come to see themselves
as a part of the dynamic political and social settings in which they
work and as having dynamic qualities of their own that enable them to
change, adapt, see challenges, identify opportunities, and create long
term roles for themselves in the process of community planning and
development.

Anchoring emergency management to any strategic or proactive principle
is a challenge. It runs contrary to the experience of most emergency
managers and certainly contrary to the old emergency management. Even
today, most emergency managers are most comfortable with a narrowly
defined conception of planning for a particular set of reactive,
anticipatory, and planned responses to specific hazards, threats, or
emergencies. Emergency management organizations have never been inclined
to expand their operational role or their strategic position. This has
resulted in a lack of strategic adaptation and lost operating efficiency
and the retarding of mission enhancement. In other words, the long term
institutional capacity building of emergency management has been
constrained and with it the ability to participate in the range of
community planning activities for which its professional input is both
legitimate and necessary. If emergency management is, as more recent
literature suggests, an integral part of broader issues and concerns
affecting community life, then it must redefine itself.

> THE NEW EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

It is an increasingly common premise that the aim of managerial work in
the public sector is to create public value (Moore, 1995). This is to
suggest that public managers, including emergency managers, utilize
scarce public resources that have value in alternative uses. The
challenge is to maximize the value attained through these resources.
Managerial success may thus be interpreted as proactively initiating and
reshaping public enterprises in ways that increase their value to the
publics they are intended to serve (Moore, 1995). One need not delve too
deeply into the discussion of public value to see that, in the linkage
of emergency management to the broader task of sustainable community
development, there is a broad and potentially dynamic connection between
emergency management and community development that holds the potential
for enhancing the public value of emergency management to the
communities it serves. The challenge is to recast emergency management
as a participant in the broad nexus of institutional and public actors
who influence the process of community planning and development.
Sustainable development is the key to this nexus.

Sustainability to the emergency manager usually means that a locality
can withstand and overcome any damage (property damage, lost economic
opportunity, etc.) without significant outside assistance (Mileti,
1999). Hazard mitigation is, more importantly, the specific emergency
management function that ties it to the concept of sustainability. The
fostering of local sustainability in the face of extreme hazard events,
natural or manmade, is a prominent theme in the current emergency
management literature. Emergency managers have been increasingly
trained, in assessing and preparing to face the specific hazard risks
that confront their communities, to think in terms of hazard mitigation.
The rationale of hazard mitigation begins with the realization that
disasters are frequently not unexpected. They stem from predictable
interactions between the physical environment and the demographic
characteristics of the communities that experience them. Based on this
realization, hazard mitigation takes the form of advanced action to
eliminate or reduce the risks and potential costs associated with
natural and manmade hazards.

In light of the historic and rising costs associated with natural
disasters in the U.S. over the decade of the 1990's, for example, it has
become accepted wisdom that a preeminent objective of emergency
management must be to mitigate hazards in a sustainable way to stop the
trend of increasing and catastrophic losses from natural hazards. It has
also, with the passage of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and
Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, become a matter of federal law. In
order to reduce the impact of recurrent natural disasters such as
hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes on human life and property, advanced
planning to mitigate the risks associated with them and to reduce the
vulnerability of communities is required by this law.

The new emergency management may well be said to have begun with a focus
on hazard mitigation. Over the past decade, emergency managers have
become more conversant with the concept of structural mitigation. This
includes the strengthening of buildings and infrastructure exposed to
hazard risks by a variety of well-known means (building codes,
engineering designs, construction practices etc.). The purpose of
structural mitigation is to increase resilience and damage resistance.
Emergency managers have also become increasingly, if somewhat more
reluctantly, conversant with the notion of non-structural mitigation as
well. Non-structural mitigation includes directing new development away
from high-risk locations through land use plans and regulations,
relocating existing developments that have sustained damage to safer
locations, and maintaining the protective features of the natural
environment that may absorb and reduce hazard impacts. The emphasis on
hazard mitigation, structural and especially non-structural, brings
emergency management into a much broader arena and significantly expands
its potential scope and impact. It brings emergency management to the
center of the vital task of planning and implementing sustainable
community development.

Planning for sustainability, or sustainable development, is a concept
originally associated with environmental policy. It has been broadened
to include all community planning including planning for economic
development. It links concerns for social, economic, and environmental
well being in a coordinated process aimed at meeting present needs while
preserving the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
Emergency management has been increasingly linked to this broader task
of sustainable development (Beatley, 19995; Gis and Kutzmark, 1995) and
hazard mitigation has been a primary vehicle for that linkage (Mileti,
1999; Schneider, 2002). The emphasis is on reducing the vulnerability of
communities to natural and manmade disasters in the context of all other
community goals such as reducing poverty, providing jobs, promoting a
strong economy, and generally improving people's living conditions
(FEMA, 2000).

The achievement of sustainable development, as a public value, requires
responsible choices for determining where and how development should
proceed. It requires, from the emergency management perspective, an
evaluation by each locality of its environmental resources and hazard
risk potential with the result being the making of a series of choices
that will impact the economic, social, and physical well being of the
community. These choices include the identification of future losses
that a community can or is willing to bear. But all public choices
relating to these matters must adhere to the value of sustainability as
defined in the context of the broader community planning and development
process.

All emergency managers know that communities must address the
interdependent causes of natural and manmade disasters and come to some
decision about which potential risks and losses are acceptable, which
are unacceptable, and what specific actions are necessary to maintain
the social, economic, and political stability necessary for the
community to flourish. But they seldom perceive this in the context of a
broader role for emergency management in community planning. But
consider the connection between the two. For example, if a community is
seeking to promote sustainability in the face of serious earthquake
risks, structural mitigation alone is insufficient. Much more is
required than building codes and the like. Sustainability also requires
a linkage of policies on building codes to policies on housing density,
to policies on urban transit, to policies on social equality, to
policies on environmental quality, to policies on economic development,
etc. In other words, all policies are linked together by the concept of
sustainability. This includes emergency management policy and brings the
emergency management function to the table as a participant in community
planning.

The goal of building sustainable communities involves, and as a critical
component, the emergency management function. The logic of hazard
mitigation, a key focus, suggests that a part of ensuring the economic,
political, and social development of a community is a full awareness of
hazard risks and a plan to mitigate them. Community planning and
development must include anticipation of and solutions to identifiable
risks associated with potential hazards. But, to the extent that
emergency management is unprepared as a profession to assert its
relevance to the broader life of the community, to the extent that it
remains disaster driven, narrow, and technical in its orientation, the
effectiveness and relevance of the new emergency management will be
restricted even if there is a greater and growing awareness of its
connection to broader issues and concerns. The new and wider context of
emergency management requires a new and more broadly engaged emergency
management professional.

> THE NEW EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONAL

If, as suggested in this analysis, emergency management is to become a
critical part of the process of sustainable community development, the
profession must come to see itself in a new context. Emergency managers
must see themselves as participating with all political and social
institutions in a coordinated effort. The primary focus must be on the
building of sustainable communities as the fundamental public value to
be served by the emergency management function. But the question remains
how, in the performing of their specific tasks, can emergency managers
organize their work to serve this public value?

As a first step, emergency managers must be trained and prepared to
articulate and develop a role for themselves as a participant in the
local consensus building effort in their community and to perceive
themselves as working on a common agenda with other community
institutions and leaders. All relevant public and private stakeholders,
as defined in the context of sustainable development, must be brought
into the emergency management planning process. Emergency managers, in
turn, must be brought in as stakeholders to the network of community
leaders and policymakers involved in community planning and development
activities.

A second step, to be accomplished as the emergency management function
is integrated into the process of community planning, is the definition
of the technical components in each phase of the function (risk
assessment, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery) as a part
of a holistic system. This entails, as the most fundamental ingredient,
the integration and consistency of all technical components with
integrated policies and programs related to disaster mitigation and
sustainability within the community. Hazard or disaster mitigation, in
essence, must be the preeminent task that ties emergency management into
the value of sustainability and defines its role in the context of
community planning and development. It must therefore be elevated to the
level of first or primary responsibility for the emergency manager. It
must also be elevated to the level of an essential or necessary
component in all community planning and development activity.

A third or final step necessary for the new emergency management to
succeed as a component in sustainable development is the linkage of all
public policies within the community to the concept of sustainability.
All policies necessary to promote the social, economic, and political
stability necessary for a community to flourish, including emergency
management policies, must be linked or integrated in the process of
community planning. The end product of emergency management must be
understood as fundamentally connected to all facets of community life in
a coordinated effort to promote sustainability.

To accomplish the three steps briefly outlined above, emergency
management needs to move from the traditional tendency to be reactive
and disaster specific. It must broaden its orientation beyond efficient
disaster response and recovery operations. Everything we have discussed
requires that emergency managers be more proactive by emphasizing hazard
mitigation. This ultimately means they must work to become networked in
partnerships that involve all community leaders associated with the
concept of sustainable development. This is to suggest that they must
become public actors in the context of a broader involvement in
community planning. To make the necessary and persuasive case to
community leaders, to build networks of support groups and stakeholders,
to establish the strategic linkages with other community leaders and
institutions necessary to bring about this transformation, technical
skill alone is insufficient. The training and education of emergency
managers needs to be refocused on the skills relevant for a more
strategic emergency management.

Increasingly, it would seem, advanced educational training at the
undergraduate and graduate level is required for all emergency managers.
The sort of training associated with public administration, including
advanced training in leadership, organizational behavior, strategic
planning, analytical methods, and public policy, has never been more
urgently needed. The challenge of articulating a broader role for
emergency management, its vital linkage to the building of sustainable
communities, and its need to emphasize mitigation all suggest that a
more proactive professional is needed. The vital tasks of networking and
building relationships within the community of decision makers, the
ability to recognize the opportunities for successful hazard mitigation
in the broader task of sustainable development, and the need for
strategic thinking and leadership all demand that the education of the
emergency management professional take on a new priority and that it
represent a broader range of competencies than the technical skills
associated with the field.

Finally, the professional training of all public management
professionals should include a basic foundation in emergency management.
Graduate and undergraduate programs alike should provide more training
that reflects the linkage between hazard mitigation, community planning,
and sustainable development. This does not mean that all public
administrators should be cross-trained as emergency managers, but rather
that emergency management should be a component of their professional
education. It should include a focus on the value of mitigating hazards
in a sustainable way as a critical and necessary component to community
planning and development generally. Such training will broaden the
understanding that the assessment of hazard potentials and the
mitigation against their potential impact is connected to the making of
a series of choices that impact the economic, physical, and social well
being of the community.

CONCLUSION

The old emergency management tended to be event or disaster driven. Its
primary focus was on response and recovery with a narrow focus on
technical capabilities. The new emergency management, driven by the
development of a stronger emphasis on hazard mitigation and increasingly
connected to the concept of sustainable development, requires that the
technical components of emergency management be seen as a part of a
holistic and more strategic system that connects the emergency manager
to the broader concerns of community planning. This requires the
integration and consistency of all technical components with integrated
policies and programs related to disaster mitigation as it is connected
to the building of sustainable communities. Resident in this development
is both the opportunity and the need to broaden the definition of the
emergency management function. This broadening and redefinition in turn
requires a more broadly trained, strategic, and proactive emergency
management professional.

The suggestions made herein are intended to further the discussion and
analysis of the new emergency management. With a conceptual orientation
centered on sustainable development and a practical emphasis on hazard
mitigation, the outline for the future of the profession is clearly
visible. The challenge now is to prepare new emergency management
professionals for the future suggested by that outline.

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