Lessons of Disaster

Thomas A. Birkland Chapter 1 – “This book is about the dynamics of policy change after sudden events known as focusing events” pg 1 “Blame fixing is a key feature of causal stories; these stories are important both in agenda setting and in laying the ground work for the selection if alternative policy directions” pg 4 “The entire field of crisis management is devoted to the development of non-normal procedures to respond to non-routine managerial problems. In other words, a disaster is what happens to individuals but a crisis is suffered by an organization, from the government broadly to individual groups” pg 5 “natural disasters are predictable in the sense that we know that a big flood, earthquake, or hurricane will happen somewhere, sometime in the future. The goal of the government is to make responses to disasters routine, reduce strain on the disaster relief and management system, and therefore reduce the likelihood of organizational crisis in the national government” pg 6 “one reason to study the process of learning from disasters is that efforts to learn and to change policy are likely to be accelerated in the wake of major events” pg 7 “the process by which participants use information and knowledge to develop, test, and refine their beliefs is the learning process” pg 8 “people and organizations in which they make decisions are boundedly rational, which means that they seek to make rational decisions within the limits of information gathering and capacity. Saying that humans are boundedly rational does not mean that people cannot improve their decisions, however. Rather, a model of decision making that rests on bounded rationality contains within it the idea that people have a problem solving orientation...[the model] also contains the ability for people to make, correct, and learn from errors” pg 9 “the ultimate goal of social policy learning and political learning is to actually effect change in some tangible way” pg 9 “humans are disproportionate information processors” pg 10 “part of the difficulty in explaining how we learn from disasters lies in the difficulty of developing a model of learning” pg 11

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