Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - July 2022

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Political Economics and Emergency Management

    by Lucien G. Canton

The Value of a Plan

    by Timothy "Tim" Riecker

Experts Share Top Indicators You Might Be Headed Towards A Crisis

    by Erik Bernstein

Political Economics and Emergency Management

When I left active duty for graduate school, my sister asked me why I was making such a radical change. When I told her how fascinated I had become with the interactions among European countries over history, she said, “You need to take a course in political economics.” Now these were two words in which I had no interest, but since she was the smart one in the family, I took her advice. I was fortunate to have an incredible professor who became a friend and mentor and found a whole new interest. Over the years I have become more and more convinced that emergency managers could benefit from an understanding of political economics.

I’m not suggesting that this became a mandatory field of study for the average emergency manager. I’ve maintained for years that one of problems is that we view emergency management as monolithic and have never developed a competency framework to define our profession. Emergency management has several career paths that require specialized knowledge and has a range of competency levels roughly equating to tactical, operational, and strategic issues. Political economics, although beneficial at all levels, is most relevant to the strategic level.
So why should senior emergency managers understand political economics? The answer is that it affects everything we do. Political economics is the study of the interrelationships between individuals, government, and public policy and how economic theory drives public policy. It creates the environment in which we operate by affecting vulnerability and hampers our ability to successfully recovery from disasters.

A classic example of the impact of poor public policy on vulnerability is the history of “redlining” in the United States that restricted the neighborhoods in which Black Americans could live. The effect of this policy was to both limit the acquisition of wealth and to create low-income neighborhoods in the least desirable parts of communities. From an emergency management perspective, this greatly increases the vulnerability of these communities. I witnessed this in my own city of San Francisco when “urban renewal” destroyed the vibrant Black community in the Fillmore District and moved the residents to Hunter’s Point, an industrial area that include a power plant later closed for excessive pollution and a former shipyard that is a superfund cleanup site.

This increased vulnerability ripples into recovery as well. I have mentioned previously the research done by Dr. Junia Howell, Dr.John Mutter, and others that demonstrate how wealth inequality has a negative impact on disaster relief. Because properties are of low value and in undesirable areas, the amount available for repairs (based on value of the property) is often insufficient to fund adequate repairs. Additionally, the neighborhoods will most likely have a very low priority for rebuilding or be candidates for government buyouts at low prices. The ultimate impact is the destruction of the pre-disaster community and the scattering of the residents.

I want to stress that so far, we have been talking about largely unintended consequences based on past poor public policy. Unfortunately, the situation after a disaster is even bleaker. In her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein demonstrates how in times of crisis people are in such a state of shock that governments can implement economic and social policies that would never have been acceptable in normal times. Among the examples is the conversion of almost all the public schools in New Orleans to charter schools following Hurricane Katrina. The results of this “market-based reform” are mixed and depends on who is doing the analysis.
This brings us back to the need for senior emergency managers to understand political economics. Clearly, there are issues here on which we can have negligible impact. However, there are things we can do:

1. We can study the history of our communities and understand where that history has created specific inequalities and vulnerabilities.
2. We can consider inequalities and vulnerabilities as we develop our plans for response, mitigation, and recovery.
3. We need to be advocates for at-risk communities when public policy is being formulated. This has been a constant theme for me: we need to be trusted advisors to our elected officials with a seat at the policy table.
4. We need to support reform of our disaster relief programs and policies on a national level.

Political economics is not by any means everyone’s cup of tea. But we must understand the impact of economic theories and public policy on vulnerability and our ability to restore the communities we are charged to protect.