Concluding the Journey…..
Enhancing My Knowledge of Resilience
This is the last of six posts initiated by the discovery and inquiry about the new Chief Resilient Officer position in my city government. As I learned more about the resilience efforts from both a national strategy and community approach I was motivated to help develop the capacity within the emergency services. Some of the key learning points were:
· The Chief Resilience Officer position is funded by a $100 million commitment by the Rockefeller Foundation — at no cost to the taxpayers! The 100 Resilient Cities Challenge (100RC) is a program to develop a network of resources to assist cities to become more resilient to 21st century threats and hazards. The focus is on the disruptions and stresses that cause vulnerabilities. This would be specific to the individual city, for example, ineffective mass transportation, endemic homeless population, and high crime or unemployment.
· The latest National Security Strategy (NSS) introduces the term resilience as “the ability to adapt to changing conditions and prepare for, withstand, and rapidly recover from disruption (due to emergencies).”(NSS, 2010) The NSS, a foundation for other future strategy documents, provides a descriptive need for policy that develops innovation, collaboration and resilience. The national strategy calls for a shared responsibility in strengthening national security and resilience through an enhanced systematic preparation against all types of threats. Throughout the recent government literature, especially the National Frameworks, the emphasis is on a whole community approach to strengthen our security and enhance resilience by fostering integration, innovation, collaboration, and leveraging coordinating organizations.
· Our homeland security enterprise has transitioned from a counter-terrorist centric construct (9/11 attacks) to an all-hazards approach (Katrina catastrophe) and is now challenged by the uncertainty of emerging threats, cascading events, and other 21st century risks and vulnerabilities. The call for innovative solutions, collaboration, integrated resources, and coordinated strategy by a whole community approach is the call to enhance resilience. As popular literature seeks answers to times of increasing volatility and instability, the federal strategy documents promote a whole community approach in five mission areas for preparedness. The goal focuses on a national preparedness system for prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery (all-hazards approach). The importance of whole community inclusiveness for capabilities based planning creates a community integration of goal design and innovation. The appeal of strengthening our resilience is building capacity for collaboration and innovation.
· This is a tremendous opportunity for many of us to broaden our purpose and value. The concept of an overarching network or culture to bridge our individual silos of excellence demonstrates critical potential, especially in long-term mitigation and recovery. I offered operational action steps within the emergency management (EM) framework as means for enhancing resilience-coordinated with resilience efforts from the whole community approach. The following policy options were:
1. Integration of the Resilience Officer position into NIMS,
2. Create Resilience Officer position within your own agency,
3. Establishing Regional or Local Collaborative Networks,
4. Formation of functional Task Forces,
5. Providing authority to a National Workgroup for a centralized comprehensive strategy.
· The key points are the ability to recover from the expected and unexpected, to monitor and anticipate future conditions, to understand correctly causation in the system and to learn to achieve the goals with in the system.
Many tweets from organizations promoting resilience and sustainability exposed me to ideas for a more proactive emergency management. Emergency management is intertwined in the homeland security enterprise as public safety and public security share the challenges of globalization, marginalization, inadequate critical infrastructure, and hyper-connected technology. In addition, many of the emergency services (fire service, law enforcement, public health) are entrenched in the community sharing the same goals of public welfare and have the capabilities to enhance resilience, if given the direction.
Current national emergency service efforts can be viewed as a laissez-faire approach, with most of the responsibilities and obligations assigned to the lowest level in the National Response Plan. The lack of consistent standards and coordinated control provides at best, diverse hierarchies and bureaucracies that have developed silos of excellence in prevention, readiness and response. The United States response strategy is currently handled by local resources and is based on low-cost preparedness, uncertain risk management options and integrated in a broader emergency management structure. The United States’ emergency preparedness and response efforts are based on a tiered system, to be handled at the lowest possible level. For example, a complicated emergency that exceeds local capability will transition to a regional incident and if needed the crisis will transfer to a state responsibility or develop into a federal disaster. This emergency structure has many benefits, including working well within the United States federalism governing system. The issue is local agencies are not responsible to the federal government and this separation of federal authority and state or local powers causes disconnect for enhancing resiliency and collaboration. The current policy does not provide a standard of performance or information sharing of smart practices. These were the reasons for most of my organizational suggestions.
Public safety and national welfare mandate a standardization of performance for strengthening our preparedness efforts (especially protection, mitigation, recovery). The challenge is to regulate a standard of performance without ‘federalizing’ the preparedness efforts. This conflict applies to enhancing resilience too, as economic constraints, resource limitations, undeveloped skill sets and political will all determine whether potential threats and hazards, vulnerabilities, stresses and disruptions are being addressed.
The situation is further exacerbated by competing local agencies and stakeholders over pubic safety and security roles and responsibilities, These participants all have different approaches, each discipline providing an organic philosophy and mission methodology that generates conflict, fragmentation or overlap. This was another reason I promoted a proactive emergency management to unite with the overarching strategy of resilience, because a collaborative, innovative and coordinated policy that promotes cost efficiency, response effectiveness and suitable risk management is vital to public safety.
In closing, I wish my writing skills were developed enough to transfer all that I have learned in researching resilience. Selfishly the posts were limited to emergency services and I feel poorly that I disregarded the wonderful efforts from those working on the cultural, social and physical complexities. It was beyond my scope. Good luck to all!
