Rethinking “trade-offs” in emergency management through an interconnectivity framework: the examples of evacuations and mitigations (revised)

From our framework’s perspective (Roe and Schulman 2023), the key feature of a “trade-off” is that it is an inter-relationship between parties, more precisely: an interconnectivity between them.

Economists tell us more guns mean less butter, other things equal. Say this produces X amount of guns and Y amount of butter. But “change one causes the other to change” is only one type of interconnectivity, in this case sequential. Assuming both guns and butter require infrastructures to produce and distribute means that other types of interconnectivity could as well explain arriving at X and Y. For example, the parties reciprocated and so ended up there; or someone from the outside mediated the interchange between the parties, leading to those joint values for the time being.

We and the economist still see X guns and Y butter, but from our interconnectivity framework perspective, it matters greatly what type of interconnection that trade-off is (i.e., sequential, reciprocal, mediated). Two examples of key concepts in emergency management help illustrate why thedifferences matter:

1. Post-Disaster Evacuations. From our framework’s view, evacuations of people from a disaster area are efforts to shift the demands for major infrastructural interconnectivities from that area to sites where those demands can be met through interconnections involving electricity, water supplies, telecoms and other lifeline infrastructures.

This means that there is difference relevant for policy and management between a disaster area now without water, electricity or telecoms and a disaster area still with levels of electricity, water and telecoms but insufficient for population demands. Even with evacuation eventuating in the latter case, the trade-offs in its origin area differ from the former case where the infrastructures and their critical services have been eliminated. If, as they say, a thing is also defined by what it is not, then evacuation also means those remaining behind.

So what? Recourse to “trade-off” terminology can be too coarse for management purposes if it is without the granularity differences in interconnectivity impose on the analysis.

2. Pre-Disaster Mitigations. From our framework’s perspective, pre-disaster mitigations are efforts to manage latent interconnections before they become manifest by virtue of a triggering disaster. This challenge is compounded by the fact that not only are some latent interconnections extremely difficult to see or predict beforehand, they and others may also only become visible during the disaster or afterwards.

So what? Any vacuum produced by difficulties in prediction matters because the professional(s) whose job it is to make these predictions and calls for pre-disaster mitigation will always be confronted by politicians, whose politics ground and justify making such calls anyway. How is this relevant for policy and management?

One answer is to shift the issue to a different question: Who is better at improvising solutions once the latent become manifest in the disaster: Those politicians, those professionals, both depending on the circumstances, others? In other words, whose improvisation learning carries more weight when it comes thereafter to offering pre-disaster mitigations? Now that’s the trade-off–interconnection–of interest!

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Source:

E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science. Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616.