Should We Stress Test Our Local Governments?
Should We Stress Test Our Local Governments?
There is room for innovative, problem-based learning on disaster and climate governance
If you are anything like me, you’ve been watching the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco with one nervous eye on the news and the other on your checking account. An important policy conversation around the bank’s collapse has been the requirement of stress-testing – the process used by financial institutions and their regulators to assess the banks’ ability to withstand severe economic scenarios. It is an important risk-management tool that helps to identify potential failure points in a complex system.
This has me thinking…what if we required local governments to undergo stress tests, but focused on disasters and long-term recovery processes? Unlike emergency managers and other professionals whose job it is to think about worst-case scenarios, many of the elected officials and local staff who I interact with are caught fairly flat-footed by disasters, especially in places that aren’t particularly prone to such events. These local decision-makers – who are mostly ordinary people taking their turn at public service and the professionals who help them make decisions – rarely have the time or incentive to think about “what if?”
A disaster stress test could accomplish several goals. By requiring that the whole of government participate, a stress test could help elected officials, staff, and various boards and commissions to ‘see’ their everyday work through a disaster lens, i.e. how the decisions they make are contributing to, or reducing, risk. We often learn hard lessons during disasters that are revelatory of the bad decisions we made under blue skies; i.e. the risk was always there, it simply gets ‘revealed’ during a disaster event. What if we proactively went looking instead? Similarly, a stress test could involve specific questions about hazards and disasters that are far outside the realm of emergency management, and that require local government action to help answer. How would a 1% annual chance flood impact your housing system, and what kinds of challenges would your displaced constituents face at 6 months? Two years? What kinds of land-use and code challenges would rebuilding a certain neighborhood likely entail? What are the likely outcomes, and are you satisfied with those? If not, what can you do differently? What would a specific disaster, at a specific time, mean for your budget? How would you make up for shortfalls in revenues? How would you meet federal match requirements for grants? What are the likely outcomes, and are you satisfied with those? If not, what can you do differently? Etc. Lastly, a stress test could be a useful opportunity for local officials to become familiar with the byzantine policy and funding environment we call long-term disaster recovery. You can read all about these things in FEMA’s extensive library of local government guides. But let’s be serious, very few do.
The idea of a disaster stress test speaks to a larger question that interests me: how can local governments effectively learn about the long-term challenges of disaster recovery, without having to experience them first-hand? We have tools like multi-jurisdictional hazard mitigation plans, and information resources from FEMA and other partners. But again, it is rare for anyone outside of emergency management to read these documents, and rarer still for the entire government to have used them. In my experience, the #1 predictor of how well a local government does in disaster recovery is whether they have recently had a disaster. That is, experience - and the institutional knowledge it brings - is what counts. Yet, most places don’t experience disasters, at least not very often. Just because something is rare doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t plan for it. In fact, that’s the entire premise of disaster and climate change planning – that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We hope and expect that the vast majority of banks will never face the kind of crisis that Silicon Valley Bank just went through, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t use stress tests to ‘see’ their vulnerabilities and make the necessary adjustments. Can we similarly create learning for local governments about likely disaster scenarios?
I’m also a big fan of problem based learning, the pedagogical approach that centers learner-collaboration and communication to solve complex, real-world challenges. Rather than the traditional ‘sage on a stage’ style of education (and FEMA trainings, I would add), a problem-based learning model uses the learning process itself to identify the areas where students need support and feedback. So, instead of teaching X and then asking them to apply it to Y problem, the students are presented with Y problem and arrive at an understanding of X. It is a tremendous way to learn, and this idea goes even a bit further by rooting the learning in the place where the learners live and work. It is one thing to know that bridges are vulnerable to debris flows and can be damaged during a storm. It is another thing to be presented with a scenario where this bridge in your community was damaged, and to know it won’t be permanently repaired for 2 years. How will you get the kids in the isolated neighborhood to school? How will the changed traffic patterns affect downtown businesses? How will that impact affect your capital planning process? Etc.
There are lots of ingredients that would be needed to make such a disaster stress test effective, like a willing and engaged local government, rich scenario development and excellent facilitators. This is well within the reach of local government in many places, especially if they hook up with a community-engaged university or regional council of government.
I admit that such learning scenarios may already exist, and if so, I would love to hear about them. Just to be clear, I’m not referring to the kinds of table-top exercises that drill disaster response, or the neat exercises like Game of Floods that teach about climate adaptation in the abstract. What I am imagining is something that generates real scenarios, rooted in real places, and that require real planning on the part of our public officials tasked with protecting the health, safety and welfare of the public. If you know about something like that, please be sure to contact me through Twitter or comment below.