Current Issue in U. S. Disaster Public Policy

Introduction

The manifest symptom of weakness in contemporary policy capability, for Dror at least, is the “scarcity of think tanks serving government”. Most countries have no think tanks or equivalents and “existing ones hardly serve momentous choices; with available think tanks suffering from significant weaknesses”. Think tanks, described by Dror[ 4] as “islands of excellence applying full-time, inter-disciplinary scientific thinking to in-depth improvements of policy making”, are a US invention, first institutionalized more than 30 years ago and, to a large degree, discredited today because of the proclivity of US policy making towards a reliance on think tanks and a view held by many that US policy making has not, necessarily, been qualitatively improved by virtue of a correlation between contemporary US policy making and think tank involvement.

Current Issue in U. S. Disaster Public Policy

This provocative conclusion about an increasing “negative balance of growing relative incapacity to govern”[ 4, p. 139] certainly provides sobering re-evaluations about social, political and organizational design potentialities in contemporary crisis and disaster management capabilities. As Dror[4, p. 139] asks, in posing the meta-policy question, do policy research organizations, better known as think tanks, help to overcome the increasing inadequacy and obsolescence of contemporary governmental systems?

To the extent that think tanks represent externalized policy capabilities rendering internal governmental advice problematic, therefore involving substantial political and organizational costs, the expansion of the think tank role will not be a natural and easy process for governments and bureaucracy. “Only if driven by the shock of serious failure will think tanks fulfill a significant role in government”[4, p. 147 (emphasis added)].

For Kaufmann [5], theories of governance do not account enough for complexities and problems. Failures in markets and hierarchies are well-documented[6, 7] but, more importantly, these two institutional forms of coordination and policy formation do not exhaust typological possibilities or current empirical developments in patterns of governance which emerge when questions are raised regarding the co-ordinating capabilities and institutional arrangements of governments[5, p. 12], let alone inter-agent response capabilities of governments in the face of extreme contingencies or crisis episodes.

Given the wide variety of political theories, constitutional provisions, institutional arrangements and administrative cultures among societies, it is extremely difficult to ascertain, let alone prescribe, common patterns of regulation and co-ordination that apply to policy or crisis capabilities. Most of our conventional thinking about the public and the private, planning, policy, markets and governments has been made obsolete by the process of change [5, p. 24 ].

This situation is exacerbated by a paucity of “new ideas on how to improve capacities to govern within professional and social science literatures and the narrow repertoire of actual experiences with various attempts at reform or re-design in basic structures of governance”[1, p. 82]. Accordingly, Dror[1, p. 82] outlines some functional requisites for high performance in enhancing the “central mind of government”. These include:

* overall and long-range, process-system views;

* “fuzzy gambling” sophistication;

* grand policy thinking and breakthrough policies;

* large-scale policy making and “momentous” choices;

* ...