Policy & Jurisdiction Discussion Group Report Sharon Dawes, SUNY Albany

Key observations & questions Events are embedded in social, economic & political systems Response has social, economic & political dimensions What is the content of a useful policy portfolio for responding to the unexpected? What are optimal policy implementation strategies for different classes of situations?

Policy process problem definition priority setting who participates who benefits, who gets hurt who pays

Policy purposes To express values & define expectations re: –role and limits of the state –relationships between citizen and state –relationships between public and private sectors –to balance competing interests

Policy instruments laws regulations court decisions practices standards –incentives for preferred behaviors –sanctions for undesirable behaviors

Jurisdictional (infra)structure level of government agency of government branch of government public vs private sector

Jurisdictional capabilities authority infrastructure (physical, social, institutional) skills (technical, managerial, political) processes data, knowledge tools relationships

Interdependencies of policies of jurisdictions of capabilities –overlaps, gaps, diversity

Starting framework Categories of Policy regulatory fiscal technological informational interorganizational coercive Categories of outcomes economic well-being human life & health human rights environmental quality cultural heritage leisure Implementation systems and strategies Unexpected situation embedded in society

Approaches Case studies of a wide variety of known events Use cases to gather and document empirical data and to understand specific events Apply the learning from the cases to create a meta-model & simulate other events

Examples of case studies

Research questions to ask in the studies and apply to the simulations What were the conditions associated with the event? (nature, extent, location, social setting, clarity of threat, nature of pre-planning, capabilities of responders, nature and quality of communication, similarity to previous experiences, etc.) What policies were applied by whom & why? Did they help, hurt, not matter? What are the interactive effects of multiple policies? What policy subsystems were at work? (different agencies, levels of government, communities of interest?) What information was used--and what assumptions were made in the absence of information? What was the effect of pre-existing policies? Were there multiple conceptualizations of the problem that activated different policy frameworks (e.g., civil emergency, act of war, criminal violation)? Do different forms of government behave differently (eg city manager vs mayor & council?)