Why do disaster research?
Disaster research is important…why the disconnect with policy?
The goal of Place/Resilience is to strengthen the connection between place-based research and policy on disasters and extreme events. For this inaugural post it seems appropriate to start with a basic question – why do disaster research?
I am writing to the choir, so to speak. But it is good to revisit what motivates us from time-to-time, and remind ourselves that disaster research and policy are really important and also really difficult. All of us in the disaster and climate world are motivated by making the world a safer place, and that is important. We need research to generalize disasters from single events to broader environmental, social, economic, and political phenomena. And we need research to inform policy design and evaluate policy outcomes. Yet disasters are classic examples of wicked problems – complex events with widely differing social and political contexts, never repeating and with no correct solution. They are also difficult because of the conditions under which we study them. If doing social scientific research is challenging, then doing that work under post-disaster conditions is often more so.
Nevertheless there is now a thriving, multi- and interdisciplinary research community that uses a wide array of tools and methods to study the causes and consequences of disasters and climate extremes. We have gotten better at describing what disasters are, how they impact people and communities, and how they are likely to unfold in the future. It is far from a perfect science, but a lot of progress is being made.
I think that most disaster researchers and practitioners agree that, in principle, that there should be a healthy relationship between research and policy. Yet, in my experience, I think it is fair to say that there is a sizable disconnect. Why is this so?
First, let’s talk about academia. Academia is where some of the most exciting and creative research on disasters and climate change adaptation is happening. And yet, for any research to be useful outside of the small circle of academic researchers, it needs to be available and understandable. We (academics) often fail on both fronts. We spend years carefully designing studies, collecting data, and writing up studies…and then lock them behind paywalls. We attend conferences primarily with other academics. We develop research questions based on ‘gaps’ in the existing literature rather than what policy-makers and practitioners care most about. We write using language more akin to high Valeryian than conversational English. And the relentless increase in tenure expectations have led to an undervaluing of policy-engaged research and an overproduction of articles and studies, making it more difficult for those who are not full-time researchers to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff. In short, we are incentivized to talk to one another rather than the world around us. There are many exceptions, of course, but academia is often not very well-suited to respond to the needs of the policy community.
On the policy side of the ledger there are also important limitations. Some of our major federal agencies – most notably FEMA – fund very little research and have only tenuous connections to the research community. Compare this to something like the University Transportation Centers or other robust agency-to-research programs. There also seems to be little interest in making available the kinds of federally- or state-collected data we could use to do high-quality comparative research across regions and events. More troubling is that many of our major policy programs have no built-in research or evaluation components and no resources or incentives to engage with the research community. The issues are not unique to our community, of course, but seem especially pronounced and counter-productive given the urgency of the challenges we face. Disaster and climate adaptation policy and practice that is evidence based will be more effective at achieving our shared goals of safe and resilient communities.
The modest goal of this blog is to help strengthen these connections. What kinds of content can you expect? It’s an evolving list, but I plan to publish:
Plain-language summaries of recent disaster research, highlighting some of the most important scientific contributions;
Detailed discussions of research design, data collection tools and methods, data analysis and visualization;
Examinations of individual disaster events, with an eye towards developing critical research questions;
Non-partisan analysis of disaster policy, and especially the evidentiary basis of those policies;
Highlighting of effective research-to-policy efforts in the disaster and climate policy space;
Whatever else seems neat or relevant, including work from my group at the Urban Institute
I hope you will read along.