I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog criticizing the work of others, and a small amount of time describing the (small) amount of work that I’ve actually done. However I’ve never actually laid out where I think we should be focusing our efforts and how we should be achieving that focus – at least not in this blog.
Earlier this year I published an article titled Only Connect: Problem Sciences, Information Systems and Humanitarian Reform in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. In the article I did lay out the framework in which I think we should be operating, and I’ll drop other bits of the article into future posts (frankly it was a bit over-stuffed). Let’s start with this:
Conceptually it is most useful to class disasters according to the level, nature and source of inputs that they mobilise, rather than the type of disaster itself. It makes sense to think of resource mobilisation moving outwards depending on the scale of the disaster – like a rock dropped in a pool, the impact of the disaster spreads further depending on its size, visualised as per Figure 1.
Each successive layer usually becomes involved only if the resources available to those occupying the next layer in are insufficient. It is clear that increasing the capacity of each layer will limit the need for additional resources, with the greatest return on investment provided by increasing capacity towards the centre. Thus the primary question in disaster management is how to ensure that individuals and (more frequently) communities mobilise sufficient resources to withstand shocks.
In an ideal world, sufficient resources the world would always be available at the lowest level, in the context of resilient communities that are able to withstand shocks with little if any external support. Realistically this is unlikely to happen for most communities around the world in the foreseeable future, and so the requirement for external inputs will continue. The secondary question is therefore how to mobilise resources successfully between one level and the next to mitigate the impact of shocks.
There, I feel better already. Unfortunately this raises the obvious question: why am I still working on the secondary question rather than the primary question? There’s an obvious answer – after 15 years of doing this work, I still haven’t figured out the most effective way of addressing the primary question. I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out.
Related posts:
One reason for working on the secondary question is that by addressing it reasonably, we will at least not kill any residual chance to work on the primary question.