|
Direct Links to Papers |
Below is a full listing of articles and working papers by The Program on Emergency Preparedness, Crisis Management, and Disaster Recovery, with brief abstracts and links to the pdfs of the papers. If you know the title of a specific paper, please navigate from the list at the right to get to the paper directly.
Arrietta Chakos, "Seismic Risk Reduction Sparks Community Resilience," October 2008.
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, "High Performance and Emergency Preparedness and Response: Disaster Type Differences," Taubman Center Policy Brief, May 2007.
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, "Against Desperate Peril: High Performance in Emergency Preparation and Response," forthcoming in Communicable Crises, edited by Deborah E. Gibbons.
What accounts for whether governments will be able to provide effective responses to unfolding disaster events? How can they best be organized to respond to significant emergencies? What must they do in advance to create the capacities they will need in the face of disasters? Answering these questions requires differentiating three different types of disaster situations. Each presents a different set of challenges in both execution and planning, and yields to different forms of leadership. Each requires different skills and processes for effective performance, and therefore, requires different forms of organization, resourcing, skill-building, practice, and other preparation in advance.
Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, "In the Eye of the Storm," Threshold (September 2006).
Dealing with a natural or technology disaster, terrorism, or an emergent infectious disease may seem a daunting prospect to school superintendents and principals. How can schools effectively prepare when already hard pressed by tight budgets, rising public expectations for educational performance, and new accountability mechanisms like No Child Left Behind? Is this an assignment in futility like the civil defense program of the 1950s and 60s? But today's educational leaders cannot avoid the challenge of disaster preparedness on the grounds that it is too difficult or that schools aren’t first response organizations. if a major threat to life or safety occurs while students are at school, educators and staff—ready or not—will shoulder responsibility for children’s lives and well-being, perhaps for an extended period.
Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, "Beyond Katrina: Improving Disaster Response Capabilities," Working Papers 2006 (Center for Public Leadership, Kennedy School of Government, May 2006).
Published as a two-part series in the Crisis/Response Journal (June and September 2006).
What weaknesses in US emergency response capabilities did Hurricane Katrina reveal? How should these problems be addressed looking forward? (This paper expands the analysis initially presented in "Katrina and the Core Challenges of Disaster Response," in the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.)
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, "Political Control and Operational Command: Building a Balanced Disaster Control System," Supplemental testimony submitted to the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, March 22, 2006.
Who should be in charge of orchestrating the federal government response in the event of a catastrophic disaster? Posing the question this way misdirects attention because it presumes that there is one overall set of issues and actions to be in charge of, and that one person can and should be the nexus of responsibility for all of these issues, taken together.
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, "Katrina as Prelude: Preparing for and Responding to Katrina-Class Disturbances in the United States," Testimony before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, March 8, 2006. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (2006) Vol. 2:3.
Hurricane Katrina was the largest and most severe natural disaster to befall the United States in at least a century. The story is not principally a story of individual failures. It is, instead, a story of failures of systems and of failures to construct systems in advance that would have permitted and helped to produce better performance and outcomes.
Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, "Katrina and the Core Challenges of Disaster Response," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, (Winter 2006), Vol 30:1.
Hurricane Katrina exposed serious weaknesses in the United States' emergency response capabilities. These problems were not simply the failure of particular places or leaders to be ready for disaster but rather an indication of more fundamental issues that must be addressed if the country is to be ready for serious challenges that may lie ahead. These problems arise mainly from the scale of the event, its novelty, and complexity of the institutions involved, and jurisdictional problems in the response.
Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, "A Command System for All Seasons?" Crisis/Response Journal (Spring 2005), Vol. 1, No. 2.
The United States is building a National Incident Management System (NIMS) to handle large-scale emergencies. This system has the potential to be flexible and geographically scalable, to organize diverse responders and response organizations so that they operate smoothly, and to cope with novel circumstances. But there are shortcomings that need to be addressed if failure or incomplete implementation is to be avoided.
Arnold M. Howitt and Jonathan Makler, "On the Ground: Protecting America’s Roads and Transit from Terrorism," The Brookings Institution Series on Transportation Reform (April 2005). Also published in Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes, eds., Taking the High Road: A Transportation Agenda for Strengthening Metropolitan Areas (Brookings Institution Press, 2005).
This paper reviews steps the federal government and states and localities have taken since the September 11, 2001, attacks to enhance the security of highway and transit systems. Although these include several positive steps, the paper argues that protecting surface transportation has ranked lower in funding and program priority among the protective actions. We explore several ways in which surface transportation security should be enhanced.
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Daniel Curran. "Recovery in Aceh: Towards A Strategy of Emergence." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 05-082, 2005.
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, "2004 Tsunami Management Challenges"
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, "The Heat of the Moment," Compass (Fall 2004), Vol. 2, No. 1.
Crisis management teams bring together people from different institutional cultures. Managing their inevitable conflicts can be a leader’s most difficult challenge. This article describes the nature of these conflicts and presents a series of short case examples that show how such rivalries complicate crisis response. It also offers suggestions about how these clashes can be managed so that their impacts are minimized.
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, "Leadership in Crisis Situations," The Encyclopedia of Leadership, edited by James MacGregor Burns, George R. Goethals and Georgia J. Sorenson. (Berkshire Publishing, 2004).
This essay probingly explores a series of questions critical for understanding and responding to crises in government and public affairs. What is a crisis? How does it differ from ordinary leadership situations or from emergencies that, while serious, do not rise to the level of a true crisis? What are the leadership requisites of managing a crisis?
Arnold M. Howitt and Robyn L. Pangi, "Intergovernmental Challenges of Preparing for Terrorism," in Countering Terrorism: Dimensions of Preparedness, edited by Howitt and Pangi (MIT Press, 2003).
Among the major obstacles to improving American preparedness for terrorism is the decentralization of the federal system across several levels of government and the fragmentation of institutions within and between different governmental units. This chapter explores how these features of American government shaped US preparedness for terrorism prior to 9/11 and how they pose challenges for future development of US capacity to prevent and/or respond to terrorist attacks.
The Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness (co-sponsored with KSG’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) operated from 1999-2003 with the sponsorship of the US Department of Justice. It brought together scholars and senior practitioners from federal, state, and local agencies to consider how the United States could prepare itself for the possibility of terrorist attack – and particularly to explore issues of intergovernmental cooperation in preparedness and response. This program produced a rich set of research papers, policy notes, and books on these topics.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |