Justin, I concur with you that this is a significant and strategic sea change for emergency management.
Due to our close relationship with FEMA, EM's may be missing a view of the "larger landscape"--nearly every federal agency and department is now in the resilience business, with numerous federal grant programs mentioning "resilience," in addition to those that are directly tied to resilience objectives.
If we rest on our laurels and continue with business as usual, we--as a profession and a discipline--run the risk of being overshadowed and left behind in the broader resilience dialogues that are ongoing at this time.
The key task before us is to recognize and account for a few important things:
1. Emergency management as a concept has been more or less unchanged over the last ~45 years. Since the NGA issued the Final Report from the Emergency Preparedness Project and the accompanying Governors' Guide to Emergency Management in 1978/79, the "four phases" model of prepare, mitigate, respond, and recover has dominated the landscape. There have been all kinds of "bolt on" additions to those four core themes, but overall the landscape is unchanged.
2. Resilience has emerged as a unifying theme, driven by (among other drivers) a focus on DEI issues, cultural competency and sensitivity, social vulnerability, and climate change/climate adaptation. The emergence of resilience as an overarching theme has broadened the interest in proactive disaster management beyond the traditional domain of old-school emergency management. Resilience is a concept with a much broader and more human-oriented lens, affording the opportunity for a much wider range of stakeholders to now be able to participate in dialogue around disaster management topics. This means that subject matter experts and knowledge from disciplines as diverse as public health, diversity and inclusion, climate systems modeling, structural engineering, etc., all now have a unifying "umbrella" concept (under the banner of resilience) that we lacked before the last decade or so. In short, this means that emergency managers need to realize that the set of stakeholders and partners we should be coordinating with has expanded considerably beyond the more traditional public safety and built environment communities we have focused on previously.
3. Speaking from a local EM perspective, I would argue that the advent of resilience as a concept is not destabilizing. In fact, it is exerting a unifying effect. For jurisdictions with proactive EM programs, accomodating the broader set of stakeholders (such as community action groups, developers and planners interested in climate change, etc.) is another opportunity for local EM's to apply "soft skills," build relationships, and deepen the connections between their programs and their communities. But, on the other hand, for programs that are more traditional (read: more hierarchical, more like old-school Civil Defense, and more oriented toward a closed-off "public safety agencies only" mentality), resilience is likely to be seen as a dilution of a mission set (if you see EM through the lens of a mission set) that is already hard to define. For those programs, resilience seems like a distraction away from what some perceive to be the core mission of EM, which -- in that case -- would be stakeholder and partner readiness for disaster response and recovery operations (as opposed to community-wide mitigation and preparedness initiatives).
On the national stage, a lot of conversations are happening around resilience. FEMA is trying to figure out, as an agency, where things need to go, and what the long-term mission and role of FEMA will be in coordinating resilience initiatives that are already ongoing and well-funded across the interagency environment.
As emergency managers, we need to be very proactive in enhancing our participation in resilience dialogues at all levels -- especially on the national stage.
My overarching concern is that solutions are being developed without the participation of EM practitioners that will ultimately impact the communities EM's serve.
As Justin so appropriately pointed out, I think we need to be preparing for some big changes on the national level, and we need to figure out what emergency management is going to look like over the long term.
For my part, I think we are looking at a change to what I am calling "Comprehensive Emergency Management 2.0," which recognizes the relationship between resilience and readiness in a way that is not accounted for in the current four phases model.
In my view, CEM 2.0 includes:
1. Program viability - managing EM programs that are capable and credible, public administration functions, grants management, maintenance of facilities and technology, and staying politically and socially relevant.
2. Readiness -- Outcomes like plans, exercises, training, and everything else that falls under the "emergency planning" umbrella, including COOP, COG, EOP's, threat assessment, deliberate operational planning, etc.
3. Resilience -- Outcomes that are focused outwardly toward the community, which rely on a two-way dialogue to understand, appreciate, and enhance the resilience of specific elements of our nationwide social and infrastructure fabrics -- in a way that is participatory, and which cannot simply be mandated or centrally-planned and executed.
4. Operations -- Outcomes related to what we have traditionally called "response and recovery," which -- as we all know -- are not different things, conceptually.
I am not proposing that we discard the four phases approach entirely, but we do need to map it onto a new framework.
Take a look at the attached graphic for an example of the model I have proposed.
I am currently working on a manuscript for publication on this topic, and hope to have it out very soon.
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Jonathan W. Gaddy
256-310-7819
jonathanwgaddy@gmail.com------------------------------