For at least two years there has been an ongoing debate on the emphasis that the Department of Homeland Security should place on resilience in lieu of a perceived prejudice for protection.
The juxtaposition of resiliency and protection as themes for the Department of Homeland Security misstates the issues – it is not either/or. A different way of looking at the problem is as a continuum of Prevent, Protect (to include Mitigate), Respond and Recover -- with preparedness as a theme underlying all of those tasks AND Resilience as the outcome. One needs to prepare to prevent, prepare to protect, prepare to respond and prepare to recover. Creating a capacity to address all of these areas in a coherent manner builds resilience in a system or in an organization. The Nation’s current challenge is to establish the full mission in one inclusive continuum that addresses national expectations and includes systems designed to achieve full recovery at the end of an event, preparedness for each segment of the continuum, and the inclusion of all relevant public and private actors in the processes.
Resilience is the goal of the continuum. We cannot prevent all occurrences, but we can prevent some, and we should focus on prevention where prevention is realistic – terrorism, flooding, pandemic and food borne illness, for instance. We cannot protect ourselves from all things, but we can focus on things that absolutely require high levels of protection – nuclear power plants, mass transportation assets, critical communications structures. While we will need to respond to failures in prevention and protection, we can focus recovery preparations on those events where we know that we will fail – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, ice storms. True preparedness for recovery requires more than the current focus on short-term recovery of basic services and functions. It requires instead an adjustment of thinking which aims from the beginning at regaining the rhythms of life, commerce, and interactions which define the long term recovery of every community. We need to see and understand the linkages between the work done before the event along the resiliency continuum and the ability to recover fully and quickly after the event.
Achieving Resilience implies the systematic inclusion of the full fabric of society in the continuum of preparedness in order to secure a full recovery. While the efforts of governments (federal, state, local, tribal) are critical, they are not sufficient. The private business sector provides most of the Nation’s critical infrastructure and must be integrated either voluntarily or through regulation. Each method will have a place. The business sector will have an incentive to participate in resilience activities where they can be shown to prevent loss and ensure a degree of protection from business disruptions. Large businesses already operate across the continuum – preventing those things that seem preventable, protecting critical assets and information, responding to disruptions as required and getting their business back on line as quickly as possible. Because the best of them operate this way on a daily basis, the private business sector inherently “gets” resilience. On the other hand, they frequently see protection as a governmental responsibility that may come with regulation, restriction and demand for proprietary information.
In a wider sense, the private sector is not limited to the private business sector but also includes the non-governmental, volunteer, faith-based, academic and associational organizations that make up our social fabric. All of these organizations are important to the resilience continuum – some are critical. Very few of these entities view themselves as agents of “protection” and yet they bring tremendous resources to the response and recovery effort when prevention and protection fail. This part of the private sector is best engaged under the rubric of resilience. Their involvement in the preparation phase can magnify the potential for faster and more complete community-level response and recovery. In addition, they can play a critical role in building a culture of individual and family resilience. This is an often invisible element of critical infrastructure protection and recovery because without staff and employees capable of returning to work, no facility or sector can sustain itself during an incident or recover and return to full functionality.
Finally, a focus only on protection leads to a built in bias against a systems or network approach for dealing with critical infrastructure and therefore does not address inherent vulnerabilities associated with critical sectors. No sector exists in isolation and none can be fully protected from failure. Resilience implies a conceptual framework that encourages an understanding of critical interdependencies between sectors and acknowledges that failure in one critical sector always affects other sectors frequently cascading sufficiently to bring down the entire system. The resilience continuum looks across sectors to discover what part of the continuum is best applied to specific parts of the system – like robust private business protecting what can be protected, preventing where prevention is possible and preparing to respond and recover where these efforts fail.
CARRI is working to help reinforce the resilience continuum.
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Being away and busy for the last two weeks I have not been able to interact with CARRIs blog postings but I must say that I truly enjoyed catching up with the recent readings. The observations and statement that “the Nation’s current challenge is to establish the full mission in one inclusive continuum that addresses national expectations and includes systems designed to achieve full recovery at the end of an event, preparedness for each segment of the continuum, and the inclusion of all relevant public and private actors in the processes…Resilience is the goal of the continuum” can not be further from the truth.
ReplyDeleteThe proposal that “Resilience is the goal of the continuum” has been in the past been mention and implied many times, as one of the central running threads throughout these postings and I would agreed that it is easier said than done.
It has brought to mind an excellent book “Flirting with Disaster” by Saundra K. Schneider. Here she argues that “human interactions are usually guided by the existing social norms” and that these norms are “upset when anticipated event occurs” She suggests however that some of these ‘unanticipated’ events many times do not lead to fundamental changes of these of these norms (p.49), and I could not agree further. Interestingly enough this academic thinker believes that some of these events are so severe or catastrophic that these norms and accepted values “ no longer appear to be relevant” (p.50) She argues that even thought no one can predict precisely how some one will react to these events, that however there are some what predictable “sequence of behaviors that occurs in nearly every such disruptive situation” (p. 50), this being known as a collective behavior.
It is in part, my suggestion that it is exactly during these times that we can begin to build resilience and make it a goal of the continuum. It would be best done in part by groups that traditionally deal with such events and have an established knowledge of needs and wants, usually the public safety organizations. It is at this critical time of these events that new emergent norms such as ‘community resiliency’ can be adapted and learned as positive collective behaviors after these catastrophic events, natural or man-made to achieve CARRI’s goals.
I've just read Al's comment on this blog and I'm a bit confused. I don't read anywhere in Warren's blog that community resilience is an 'emergent, new norm.'
ReplyDeleteRespectfully, the perspective presented in the comment seems exactly backward from CARRI's. CARRI holds that community resilience, demonstrated in the will and capacity of a community to get back to normal, captures a long-held social norm, even if the term itself is relatively new. Terms, in and of themselves, do not completely define or confine their motivating underlying social norms. I argue that a system does not have to be completely broken to rethink some of its underlying, normative assumptions. Ironically, as much as we all hate the thought of disaster, they offer us those opportunities in the recovery phase.
Let me offer a counter-example that suggests a non-devastating disaster allows a community to consider and embrace an emergent, new norm:
In a previous blog, Warren referred to one of my 'nuggets' of recovery that points out that phase does not necessarily mean going back to the way things were. Rather, thoughtful disaster recovery allows newly emerging social norms to flower more. The controversial decisions that were made around the Embarcadero Freeway that was damaged in 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake is an example. After the freeway suffered significant, but certainly not total damage, a segment of San Francisco's leaders decided to go ahead and tear it down rather than rebuild. In its place, they created a space that was open for people to access the water and the old Ferry Building and built a walking pier out on the water. This, rather than restore the freeway--a decision that was guided by a norm that we must promote and design our automobile culture. To be sure, there was a terrific battle amongst the populace over this decision--with some supporting the rebuilding of the massive, double-decker Freeway and others supporting the more human scale boulevard that replaced it, along with the opening of a large, public plaza. But is that not precisely the point? When normative values clash, we should expect such clashes because I suspect there will always be those who cling to the old norms, no matter how devastating the disaster. In this particular case, the result of the clash of norms was that an 'emergent, new norm' won over the old one.
afelts
I read Alfu15’s comment closely and I, too, am confused but for different reasons. He seems to be taking issue with Warren’s statement that the resilience continuum should include “all relevant public and private actors in the process.” As he puts it, it “cannot be further from the truth.” He closes with “It would be best done in part by groups that traditionally deal with such events and have an established knowledge of needs and wants, usually the public safety organizations.” Alfu15 seems to miss the point and value of CARRI’s deeply held view that effective recovery requires the full fabric of the community, and is not wholly the purview of public safety organizations.
ReplyDeleteFirst I must state that it’s wonderful and truly a learning blog writing experience for me, to see that more individuals are interacting in CARRI’s blog posts, comments and responses. I would do my best to respond and answer both comments. First, as I re-read my post to see what triggered these responses, when most go unanswered, I read my statement in the first paragraph that “Resilience is the goal of the continuum can not be further from the truth”, sadly, this was inaccurately worded, what was intended was that “nothing can be more true”. Unfortunately being retired, I do not have a proofreader in my household.
ReplyDeleteHaving operated at numerous incidents of national significance as well as having operated at and personally experienced the 9/11 disaster in NYC, I have come to well realize the critical need of having all actors, local, state, federal, private, non-governmental organizations, faith-based groups and most importantly the citizens themselves in establishing a true resilient community. Preparedness and recovery is truly a shared responsibility. In fact I strongly believe that it is the only way we can begin to address the complex problems that face our cities and townships during these events.
That being said I would state that the comment “community resilience is an “emergent, new norm.” would hold true in the context that communities are being redefined in a more and larger geographical disperse area that are more and more interdependent. I also firmly believe and hold true of CARRI’s deeply held view that effective recovery requires the “full fabric” of the community and do not at all take issue with Warren’s statement that the resilience continuum should include “all relevant public and private actors in the process.”
Simply put, the point that I am making is that it is during these catastrophic events (and as stated in a response, it does not have to be catastrophic), where community “gaps” can be identified and hopefully corrected for a more resilient community. It is here that communities can identify their capabilities that were lacking (i.e. communications, planning, facility management, critical infrastructure protection, mass care, mass prophylaxis, etc.) and incorporate lessons learned and appropriate community capabilities from these disasters into preparedness priorities and thereby build more resilient communities.
Lastly my comment that “it would be best done in part by groups that traditionally deal with such events and have an established knowledge of needs and wants, usually the public safety organizations” comes from the above comment in mind. Thankfully disasters do not occur in our towns or cities repeatedly, however realizing that we are truly an interdependent nation, we hopefully can pre-identify the specific gaps and specific community preparedness. Now we can begin to address its appropriate required capabilities to address those gaps in order for our communities to be more prepared and truly become more resilient. With these thoughts in mind, I believe that these public professionals can go along way in assisting our communities, in identifying, planning scenarios, community vulnerabilities, coordinated capabilities and identifying resources needed to achieve the best possible levels of resiliency and preparedness. I thank you for your inspired and sincere responses.