within different regional boundaries. In civil society, issues of uncoordinated or well-coordinated scale may arise between international, national and local NGOs, and in the commercial world between international headquarters and local offices and franchises.
Disasters rarely respect administrative boundaries, and so the boundaries of government and administration may be barriers to understanding disasters and to effective preparation and response. The spatial boundaries of emergency management policy may be, for most other policy concerns, strange and illogical – vegetation type for wildfires, river corridors for flooding, demographic groups for epidemics – and difficult to support or reconcile administratively. Yet, should administrative boundaries be considered sacrosanct, then vulnerability to events will likely increase.
Whatever the formal structure, emergency management is expected to encom- pass an increasing variety of agencies, sectors and interests: this is much more than
‘whole of government’ – it approaches ‘whole of society’. Failure to engage with the wider range of groups is likely to see formal emergency management organizations reduced to playing a part role, with essential work left undone.
circumstances, law and economic imperatives often coalesce to sideline emergency management concerns. Economic or ‘market’ factors, such as taxation, fees and charges, and the price of land and insurance, may act to encourage or discourage appropriate action by commercial entities, as well as individuals. An obvious example concerns incentives to develop hazardous land. Of course, in many cases, people have little option but to occupy such locations faced with the need to gain liveli- hoods and housing, regardless of the legalities. The informal or shanty towns of many cities testify to this. Laws might mandate the provision of improved housing in low hazard areas; but the people involved often have to live adjacent to their livelihoods.
Resolving the issue of which emphasis makes the greater contribution to resilience is difficult. For examples where law has acted in these circumstances, see Handmer and Monson (2004). Less obvious is the full commercialization of essential services, such as electricity or gas, where it becomes more profitable for the company to sell the product to another jurisdiction during a period of high demand, leaving an area without reliable supply. Law from areas apparently far from the immediate concerns of emergency management may nevertheless be very important.
Changes to both the legal and economic frameworks can arise from inquiries conducted after a disaster. Typically, post-disaster inquiries are quasi-legal in form and too often focus on the attribution of blame and protection of elected officials.
As a result, important recommendations are easily overlooked or, if accepted, starved through lack of resourcing. This is not always the case, and many inquiries are conducted in the spirit of learning and improvement.
The final, and often overlooked, role of law is the codification of social values and goals as objectives and responsibilities in statute law. Agency staff will address those functions assigned to them in enabling legislation before any additional and non- compulsory coordination functions; therefore, if inter-agency coordination is agreed as required, then enabling legislation should recognize and mandate such work. The law plays a fundamental role in structuring the institutional system and should be a key player in discussions of institutional change.
Conclusion
There are as many institutional options for dealing with disasters as there are policy instruments (see Chapter 6), and none are inherently superior or generically applicable. Nevertheless, the choice matters: the needs of a specific context can define more precisely the institutional settings most likely to reduce vulnerability and to react effectively to the unexpected or feared. As disasters are framed as more and more a whole-of-society issue, the range of actual institutions and options expands.
In reality, there will always be a number of distinct formal and informal emergency management institutions in any given place and time. Most will overlap to some degree; but some, such as those in other countries, may not. Some will be connected and cooperate; others may not. In the face of varied and uncertain events, the institutional framework needs to be open and adaptable in the mode and scale of its operation, but sufficiently predictable to be relied on. It needs to be able to adapt to a very wide range of priorities and circumstances: prevention of routine emergencies
demands different skills and strategies in response and recovery than a large-scale complex event with explicit international dimensions.
A major challenge in institutional design is being able to link with and coordi- nate diverse groups, as needed, for different problems and circumstances, includ- ing international linkages, those in the commercial world and a range of NGOs.
Perhaps more difficult is the ability to work with all groups in society, including those normally invisible, such as undocumented workers, institutionalized popula- tions and the semi-literate.
The greatest task in this sense is not the specific design of singular institutional mechanisms, even if the poor design and subsequent failure of one such mechanism may have tragic consequences. It is the recognition of the more complex institutional system and the coordination and optimal function of that system.