Policy & Jurisdiction

Discussion Group Report

Sharon Dawes, SUNY Albany

Key observations & questions

• Events are embedded in social, economic & political systems

• Response has social, economic & political dimensions

• What is the content of a useful policy portfolio for responding to the unexpected?

• What are optimal policy implementation strategies for different classes of situations?

Policy process

• problem definition

• priority setting

• who participates

• who benefits, who gets hurt

• who pays

Policy purposes

• To express values & define expectations re:– role and limits of the state– relationships between citizen and state– relationships between public and private sectors– to balance competing interests

Policy instruments

• laws

• regulations

• court decisions

• practices

• standards

– incentives for preferred behaviors– sanctions for undesirable behaviors

Jurisdictional (infra)structure

• level of government

• agency of government

• branch of government

• public vs private sector

Jurisdictional capabilities

• authority

• infrastructure (physical, social, institutional)

• skills (technical, managerial, political)

• processes

• data, knowledge

• tools

• relationships

Interdependencies

• of policies

• of jurisdictions

• of capabilities

– overlaps, gaps, diversity

Starting framework

Categories of Policy•regulatory•fiscal•technological•informational•interorganizational•coercive

Categories of outcomes•economic well-being•human life & health•human rights•environmental quality•cultural heritage•leisure

Implementation systems and strategies

Unexpected situation embedded in society

Approaches

• Case studies of a wide variety of known events

• Use cases to gather and document empirical data and to understand specific events

• Apply the learning from the cases to create a meta-model & simulate other events

Examples of case studies

Good response Poor response

Natural Northridge earthquakeNortheast ice storm

Hurricane Andrew

Human accidental California energy crisis BhopalExxon ValdezChernobyl

Human intentional 9/11 Pearl HarborAnthrax after 9/11Columbine HS

Research questions to ask in the studies and apply to the simulations

• What were the conditions associated with the event? (nature, extent, location, social setting, clarity of threat, nature of pre-planning, capabilities of responders, nature and quality of communication, similarity to previous experiences, etc.)

• What policies were applied by whom & why? Did they help, hurt, not matter?• What are the interactive effects of multiple policies?• What policy subsystems were at work? (different agencies, levels of government,

communities of interest?)• What information was used--and what assumptions were made in the absence of

information?• What was the effect of pre-existing policies?• Were there multiple conceptualizations of the problem that activated different

policy frameworks (e.g., civil emergency, act of war, criminal violation)?• Do different forms of government behave differently (eg city manager vs mayor &

council?)