Abstract
Keywords
Taken together, the two articles in this issue of the State and Local Government Review’s (SLGR) Governance Matters (GM) section might be said to be as much about the management of emergence as they are about emergency management. Although both articles focus on the administrative practice of emergency management in state and local governments, they do so without focusing on suddenly developing crisis events or predetermined, agency-based reaction to them. Rather, they emphasize slowly developing, less specific (yet potentially as disastrous in the long run) occurrences like climate change as well as broad-based, decentralized (although likely as sound) possibilities for developing responses. They combine the ideas of emergency and emergence in a unique way.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2014), the word emergency has several meanings. In ordinary modern usage, it connotes “a state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action.” In this meaning two things are emphasized in the modern usage. The first is that the emergency is an “event” of some sort. The second is that there is an “urgency” in paying attention to the event. Interestingly, the word emergency is related to and formed from the word emergence which, in its modern usage, carries the same sense of rising up and coming into view as emergency, but does not connote so strongly a demand for reaction. Rather, it emphasizes more the simple fact of becoming visible, apparent, or known. The word emergence places less importance on the notions of either an episodic occurrence or the urgency of attending to it.
Both concepts are prominent in the academic literature on administration. The former, emergency, is the key idea in an important subfield of public administration, emergency management. It is what is being talked about when considering state and local government’s response to sudden, calamitous crisis events (Waugh and Streib 2006). Also, it is the governing concept in other important crisis-driven public administrative settings ranging from emergency rooms to emergency sessions. The latter idea of emergence has a home in the organizational literature and related public administrative topics (Gardner 2013). It is a central notion in the discourse on the slow, gradual, and decentralized evolution of administrative organizations and solutions. It is a key notional part in the advent of the study of organizational networks, organizational development, and knowledge-based and learning organizations (Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008).
Local Government Emergency Planning: Hazard Management and the Whole Community
One GM article in this issue, “Local Governments and Climate Change in the United States: Assessing Administrators’ Perspectives on Hazard Management Challenges and Responses” by Brian Gerber, is about the emergence of slowly developing crises that are the result of the interaction of the changing climate and a specific locale. The evolution of hazardous situations, such as potential for flooding or drought due to the hard-to-predict consequences of a changing climate, affects both the length of the planning horizon and the confidence in risk assessment of local government. Local governments must plan to address not only low probability and high consequence events like hazardous material spills but also high-probability and slow consequence events like soil and shore erosion or drainage and flood plain changes. The particular circumstances greatly affect the possibility of developing both timely and appropriate administrative reaction. The Gerber article starts from the perspective that local governments have become important actors in the adoption of measures to address climate change induced hazards. These hazards that local governments face can be slow to develop, not obvious, and due to interacting occurrences like the effects of a prolonged drought that increases the possibility of wildfires and subsequent erosion and flooding. Gerber interviewed twenty-two administrators about their views on vulnerability to climate change in ten cities purposively selected by location and susceptibility to climate change effects. He found that a majority of responding cities did take climate change seriously and were taking action to respond to it.
A second article, “Embracing Crowdsourcing: A Strategy for State and Local Governments Approaching ‘Whole Community’ Emergency Planning,” by Jesse Sievers, is about the use of a decentralized, nonexpert, community-based knowledge technique for the development of emergency response plans. Two of the most difficult things to accomplish in local emergency planning are to ensure adequate information from the community in an environment dominated by centralized public safety agencies and to gain acceptance by the communities of the difficult policy choices embodied in the plans. Sievers offers the example of gaining public opinion about and acceptance of prioritization decisions in pandemic vaccination plans. The crowdsourcing approach can enhance both the suitability and acceptance of planned solutions. He lays out a framework for the utility and practice of crowdsourcing in emergency planning particularly pointed at helping local governments meet the Federal Emergency Management Agency requirement to take the “Whole Community” into account. Sievers briefly presents the development of crowdsourcing as a problem-solving tool and the advantages and limitations of using it to solve public problems like those found in emergency planning. He lays out a framework for applying crowdsourcing in its most common, modern use: using digital means to easily and cheaply gather information from large, self-selected groups (crowds) of interested participants who are stakeholders in a problem and have potentially valuable knowledge about how to solve it.
Conclusion
The articles in this SLGR issue’s GM section remind us of two things in the field of emergency management that can be overlooked in the attention to riveting, natural disaster incidents and speedy, protocol-driven responses to them by top-down public safety agencies. First, that some crises are slow to develop and to manifest themselves rather than sudden and immediately obvious. The notable example is climate change and its potential for hazardous effects that depend not only on local vulnerability to and interaction of those effects but also on the degree of serious forethought and preparation by those locales to face them. Second, that good and acceptable solutions to calamitous situations can arise out of the combined ideas of many people reinforcing and cancelling each other out rather than through the analysis of problems and the design of standard responses by experts. Here, the noteworthy illustration is the use of crowdsourcing to create a virtual marketplace that provides not only a supply of valuable information, but also a ready-made buy-in for the products of the process.
What these two articles have in common is an approach that seeks to have problems and their solutions “emerge,” on one hand, from an interaction of time and circumstances (as illustrated by climate change) and, on the other hand, from the interaction of people and organized, goal-seeking endeavors (as suggested by crowdsourcing). The field of emergency management can only benefit from making sure that these considerations are taken into account whenever possible in theorizing, analyzing, and practicing. Viewed as a whole, the articles in this SLGR issue’s GM section could be said to put the “emergence” back into “emergency management.” It is an idea potentially worthy of further discussion and future research.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.