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For Emergency Management: Postmodern Disaster Theory

Legal preparedness for disaster consists of implementing the optimal portfolio of rules for managing catastrophic risks. This article extends the simpler model of modern disaster theory,, into a more ambitious model of postmodern disaster theory. A complete account of disaster law and policy based on an extended analogy to quantitative finance must address all aspects of that discipline, from the beautiful symmetries of modern portfolio theory to the disturbing behavioral insights and the vastly expanded mathematical arsenal of the postmodern critique.

Postmodern disaster theory represents a comprehensive account of catastrophic risk management. It organizes its postmodern agenda for legal management of risk and uncertainty according to higher statistical moments. Skewness has inspired alternative ways to measure risk-adjusted performance. To illustrate how the problem of fat tails and excess kurtosis confounds the measurement and management of risk, this article conducts parametric value-at-risk (VaR) analysis with the logistic distribution, a leptokurtic analog of the Gaussian distribution. Incomplete statistical models of risk dangerously blind the law to certain sources of financial or environmental peril.

Risk management through quantitatively informed legal tools is the unifying principle that harmonizes disaster policy in all domains, from the regulation of systemically important financial institutions to the prevention and mitigation of natural disasters. Postmodern disaster theory exploits the full range of sophisticated methods analogous to those used in quantitative finance. Comprehensive quantitative understanding promises to place disaster law on the efficient frontier of legal preparedness.


For Emergency Management: Tracking the evolution of the disaster management cycle: A general system theory approach

Officials and scholars have used the disaster management cycle for the past 30 years to explain
and manage impacts. Although very little understanding and agreement exist in terms of
where the concept originated it is the purpose of this article to address the origins of the
disaster management cycle. To achieve this, general system theory concepts of isomorphisms,
equifinality, open systems and feedback arrangements were applied to linear disaster phase
research (which emerged in the 1920s) and disaster management cycles. This was done in
order to determine whether they are related concepts with procedures such as emergency,
relief, recovery and rehabilitation.

For Emergency Management: Integrating Theory into Practical Emergency Management


For Emergency Management: The Lessons of Comprehensive Emergency Management Theory for International Humanitarian Intervention

Doctoral Dissertation: This project seeks to expand the dialogue about international humanitarian intervention in a complex emergency or mass atrocity situation by asserting that post-intervention political reconstruction is as essential to the intervention as is the provision of material humanitarian aid and even the ostensive goal of protecting the aid regimes. As a result of this assertion, consideration of humanitarian intervention has, to this point, been too focused on the legal, ethical, and theoretical implications of war and hegemony. The current dialogue centers on its security studies aspects, owing largely to its Cold War precedent. However, a full consideration of the subject of humanitarian intervention must also consider the broader implications of the intervention, including recovery and mitigation of future events. When this is considered at all, the literature to this point largely treats post-intervention establishment of political and social infrastructure as a secondary consideration to the military intervention.

For Emergency Management: The Key To Disaster Survival? Friends And Neighbors

It seems as though there have been a lot of disasters recently – the earthquake in Japan, tornadoes in places like Missouri and Alabama, and those wildfires, to name just a few. With each of those disasters, we hear a lot about the emergency personnel, equipment and ambulances that are rushed to the scene.

But new research shows there’s something more important than rescue crews and government aid.

NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam reports that what really matters are neighbors.

For Public Administration: Traditional Public Administration versus The New Public Management: Accountability versus Efficiency

The development of the classical model of administrative owes much to the administrative tradition of Germany and the articulation of the principles of bureaucracy by Max Weber. The development of modern bureaucracies made possible the industrial revolution and the breakthroughs of modern economies. But at the end of the 20th century that classical model of public administration was challenged by what has been called the “new public management.” This chapter will characterize the “traditional” and the “new public management”approaches to public administration and then compare them on three fundamental questions that every theory of public administration must answer: 1) what shall be done, i.e. policy direction; 2) who shall do it, i.e. personnel management; and 3) how to enforce compliance, i. e. accountability. The conclusion will examine the tension between accountability and efficiency in traditional public administration and the new public management in answering the three fundamental questions posed above.

For Public Administration: Woodrow Wilson on Administration

Woodrow Wilson on Administration.

The essay, published in the Political Science Quarterly in July 1887, advocates a trained bureaucracy that has the expertise and the will to oppose popular opinion when they deem it necessary. In contrast to the founding principle of equality—meaning that claims to superior wisdom cannot justify rule and that legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed—Wilson argues that expertise is a title to rule.