Traps, Assumptions and other acts of Policy Self-Sabotage – part two
Sometimes the more we try to fix something the worse it gets; or the people left to do the fixing end up broken. Sometimes we are not even sure ‘who’, ‘when’ or ‘what’ the ‘fix’ is for. Such is often the case with disaster struck communities. We suggest tools that can prevent unintended consequences, reveal these hidden policy saboteurs and dismantle them at source.
This blog is the second in a two-part micro-series by Jo Chaffer, Deborah Blackman, Girish Prayag, Hitomi Nakanishi and Ben Freyens, taking a systems look at policy problems.
Part One may be found here.
Three little words……
Community – Recovery – Wellbeing: we all know what these mean, right? Or do we? Does the meaning I load into these words differ from the meaning they hold to you, or when we use them in one context and not another? All three words are what Levi-Strauss might call ‘floating signifiers’, they can hold many different meanings. While they are commonly used in describing disaster recovery efforts, often the meaning is ambiguous i.e., without saying what is meant. This becomes a problem if, for example, policy makers inferred meanings are different from householders, recovery-agencies or insurers meanings or the terms are just used fuzzily without anyone having really contemplated or articulated what was specifically meant. In these instances policies may potentially fail, struggle or, worse, create more problems than they resolve to fix.
Community. In the disaster literature, policy and practice areas, community is a key term. Disasters are said to break communities such that they unable to cope using their own resources (UNDRR); volumes of relief and recovery handbooks, policies, protocols and literature are devoted to preparing and recovering communities for and from disaster, building their resilience etc. However, unlike in the social sciences, the term community in disaster work is remarkably ambiguous and littered with assumptions. For example, in many of the recovery policy documents we read in our Canterbury earthquake recovery case study, ‘community’ implies ‘the people who live(d) here (before or now)’ or ‘the disaster-affected’. However, in the surrounding narratives about what recovery will achieve the idea of relationships, belonging, values and group is invoked, more akin to ‘sense of community’. One is relatively simple, able to be counted and measured e.g., number of people housed, whereas the other is complex, comprising dynamic and delicate series of interconnections, interdependencies, beliefs and behaviours. When ‘community’ is ‘who’ is being recovered, for ‘whom’ policies are created, and ‘who’ is consulted with, it is essential that ‘who’ we mean by the term ‘community’ has clarity and consistency. Otherwise recovery efforts and resources are directed towards achieving goals that, at best, may be only part of the picture and at worst, exclusory or misdirected.
As systems thinkers we found it most helpful to consider ‘community’ to be a ‘system of systems’ in that it encompasses communities of relation, communities of place and communities of practice, the organisations and institutions (including those of governance) that sit within and across that particular geographical place.
Recovery: We were surprised to find that recovery, specifically long-term recovery has been notoriously tricky to define or capture. There are assumptions loaded around who ‘does’ recovery (the disaster-affected, external agencies or both?), when recovery is ’done’ (when could a community be said to ‘be recovered’ and who calls it?), what can and should be recovered (and is this to the same state as pre-disaster, thereby potentially locking in any pre-existing inequities?)
As disaster is said to ‘break’ communities, we argue that recovery is therefore about supporting and enabling communities to reconstitute to such a point as they can be self-supporting again. If considering communities as systems-of-systems, then recovery becomes a wholly more involved and nuanced affair, not just surge capacity to repair or (re)build infrastructure, but potentially also surge capacity for governance and guidance; for rebuilding relationships, webs of interconnections and interdependencies with those who remain, those who move in and those who (have been) move(d) away. It’s complex and entirely context dependent, requiring watch-and-listen, step up-step back type approaches rather than plan and deliver.
Whatever the processes and timelines, it is generally understood that to have attained ‘recovery’ (‘to be recovered’) necessitates the disaster-affected, as individuals or collectively, have access to critical infrastructures and some sense of wellbeing. This requires some sense of what that ‘wellbeing’ looks and feels like.
Wellbeing: Wellbeing is another artfully vague and oft over-used term. What constitutes a person, or a ‘community’s sense of wellbeing is complex, multi-faceted, changeable, and hard to predict or provide. It is multidimensional including the sense of a life worth living, the material aspects that make life feel comfortable and much more besides. Like community, it is not something that can be constructed from designs and parts – it emerges. In systems terms we might think of wellbeing as an emergent property whose emergence can be influenced, not directed. It is affected by decisions made pre-disaster, and from the time of the disaster onwards, by how those decisions are made and who informs them and the context in which they sit.
Our request to policymakers and policy-users alike, whether working in disaster recovery or any other public sphere: work together to clarify what meanings you assign to big, ambiguous ‘little’ words like community, tease out your own assumptions and check-in on whether these hold true in the context and for the people with whom you are operating. We found that unpacking these terms and saying what is meant, as we have done in our case study, provided direction on the fundamentals of the recovery system design. In systems terms ‘the design paradigm’ is one of the most powerful points to intervene. Solid design should result in an effective system, one that is less prone to, but not immune from, system traps, assumptions and their unintended consequences.
Considering system traps and assumptions from the start can avoid policy self-sabotage. Our systems-world learnings: be mindful of where the ‘boundaries’ of the recovery system are drawn – who is in, who is not; be clear about the purpose and goals of the recovery effort; start with a plan then pay close attention to the consequences, intended and unintended, of the decisions and actions taken and, crucially, be ready to adjust the plans, actions, resourcing…….everything, as those consequences take shape.
To read more on this, please go to the full paper here.