Community Complexity and Need for a Framework

The following is offered by Dr. John Plodinec, Associate Director for Community Resilience Certification at CARRI and Science Advisor, Savannah River National Laboratory.

Generally, communities in early America were formed based on the perceived self-interest of their members – at convenient points for land or water transportation, or near valuable natural resources, or for mutual defense or for religious reasons. These early communities quickly became hubs of activity for the common good – for defense against hostile intruders, for trade, for education.

In the earliest days, most communities were self-sufficient – the community provided its citizens with the essentials from local farmers, artisans and craftsmen. The community had to be relatively self-sufficient; most communities were rather isolated (for example, it would take two hours to go from Harlem to central Manhattan, even by ferry) and travel farther than a few tens of miles was both difficult and expensive. These early communities were also relatively stable; their reasons for being - whether economic, defensive or religious – changed very slowly. For most communities, this meant that in times of crisis, people almost instinctively knew who they could rely on for support in times of crisis. Timely assistance could only come from their friends and neighbors - people they had known their entire lives - to recover.

With the growth of cities like Philadelphia, Charleston, Boston and New York, the nature of communities began to become more complex. Instead of looking to the entire community in a crisis, people relied on their neighborhood for support. The neighborhood was largely a place where you lived, and citizens had to look to other neighborhoods – and eventually other communities - for some of their needs. Thus, while early American communities were self-sufficient, cities – and especially neighborhoods – became less so.

At the same time, communities became more dynamic. The waves of immigrants from Europe, then Asia, and then from within the US (particularly the Great Migration of African Americans from the South after Reconstruction ended) resulted in huge changes in the ethnic makeup of even single neighborhoods – for example, Harlem, in New York, was successively primarily Dutch (the Roosevelts lived there), Irish, Jewish, Italian, and African American within the span of 100 years. Thus, individual citizens were less likely to know all of their neighbors, and certainly not for all of their lives. In times of crisis, people more and more turned for support either to other types of “communities” – for example, their church – or to some organized and recognized assistance agency, either public or private.

Further, the changing needs of individual citizens within communities led to the growth of a patchwork quilt of infrastructures intended to fill those needs. These infrastructures might be in private hands (e.g., a private electric company), owned and serviced by the public (the road system), or a combination of public and private (private physicians, public and private hospitals, augmented with other services supplied by non-governmental organizations).

If we fast forward to the first decade of the 21st century, we find that these trends have resulted in communities enmeshed in a web of interdependencies. Within the community, the various infrastructures depend on each other, and can interact in complex ways. Virtually no communities are self-sufficient – they rely on others in their region or state, and sometimes foreign countries to provide some of the essentials of existence.

And there is no one model that describes every community. While communities all perform the same functions, they are distinguished by how – and how well – they perform them. Their organizational infrastructure – the mix of public and private organizations that actually carry out a particular community function - can assume a myriad of forms, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Thus, in times of crisis, a community needs a roadmap telling it how it is connected both within and externally, so that it can identify where resources may be available, and how best to use them.

A community resilience framework can help communities develop that roadmap. A useful framework will provide a community with a means to look at itself and understand how it functions, including how it is interconnected with other communities. It will also enable a community to better anticipate the direct and indirect impacts of a disaster. As a result, the community will be able to identify the resources likely to be available after a disaster, and how to use them with maximum effect.

Community Resilience – What Federal Government Can Do

In a 2009 paper by the British Think Tank, Demos, titled, “Resilient Nation,” author Charlie Edwards suggests that for the UK, the role of central government in community resilience should be limited and mainly supportive of local and regional efforts. He recommends a central government role based on four “Es” – Engagement, Education, Empowerment and Encouragement. Although written for the UK, the paper has great relevance for the US and is well worth reading. The full paper can be found on the Demos web site at http://www.demos.co.uk/. These four Es may be useful in thinking about how DHS relates to other partners in the homeland security enterprise in the area of disaster preparedness and recovery.

The federal government (largely through the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency) plays two significant roles in community disaster resilience. In the first role, DHS is the leader of the federal response to incidents of national significance – the nation’s first responder at the federal level. As such, DHS acts in a top-down manner as a cabinet-level department within the federal government. In the second role, DHS is the leader of the nation’s “homeland security enterprise” and must coordinate many different types of efforts including disaster preparedness and recovery. In the past, DHS has fulfilled this role by acting as the approver of state and local plans, providing funding for preparedness planning and coordinating federal efforts to prepare for recovery.

DHS has steadily improved its ability to carry out the first role. But while the National Response Framework lays out an operational framework for response, the framework has not been fully effective in helping DHS carry out its second role – coordinating preparedness and recovery efforts across the Homeland Security Enterprise. In fact, the lessons of the past decade demonstrate inherent tensions in these two roles that produce expectations that often cannot be met within the constraints of traditional emergency management.

In our view, nationally DHS must help nurture communities in developing their inherent resilience; help train them in concepts, tools, and practices that develop, support and enhance disaster resilience; and provide incentives to communities that demonstrably increase their disaster resilience. The returns to the nation for this federal effort are communities that enhance the power of national programs by inculcating realistic expectations and by applying local power in an effective and efficient way. This approach harmonizes the two roles of DHS and allows DHS to change from being solely a federal “control” agent (which it is sometimes seen as doing ineffectively) to becoming a facilitator of rapid and effective return to normal community functions (a role that will properly and successfully leverage the federal resources and might).

A number of surveys and studies reveal that the current federal hierarchical, response-centric approach has elevated the public’s expectations of federal responsibility and capability well beyond the nation’s needs —and the Federal government’s ability to deliver – particularly in light of longer term trends such as the projected increase in climate variability. The nation would be better served to engage communities in a way that sets more realistic expectations and increases the incentives to become resilient at the local and regional level.

Engaging the Full-Fabric of Communities

Not only must disaster resilience be the cornerstone of a new disaster management culture in the US, and not only must it be built on resilient communities and regions, but disaster resilience must also engage the “full fabric” of our society. While the efforts of governments (federal, state, local and tribal) are critical, they are not sufficient. True disaster resilience requires a complex collaboration of government at all levels with crucial private sector energies and assets. The private sector is not limited to the private business sector but also includes the non-governmental, volunteer, academic, non-profit, faith-based and associational organizations that make up our social fabric. All of these organizations are important to the resilience continuum – some are critical. The private business sector provides much of the nation’s critical infrastructure and must be integrated either voluntarily or through regulation. Each method of integration will have an accepted and welcomed 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. Many large businesses already operate across the resilience 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 understands disaster resilience. It is critical that the Department of Homeland Security continue its efforts to engage, involve, and embed all of these critical non-governmental elements into the full homeland security “enterprise.”