I
I’ve just finished a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to happen offshore in their nearby Cascadia Subduction Zone. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.
More formally, the counterfactual thrown-up to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.
No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead there.
II
If your world is the world, you will very quickly come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.
III
A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.
Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.
For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response
IV
So what?
We are a rich country that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have infrastructures either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what another literature calls denial.
Source
O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 