The Primacy of Partnership: Scoping a New National Disaster Recovery Policy

Abstract

Hurricane Katrina is widely perceived as a threshold-crossing event, capable of bringing about changes in public policy comparable with those that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Headline-grabbing proposals for improving the leadership of disaster-management organizations divert attention from a task of greater importance: the nourishment of partnerships among different stakeholder groups. Such partnerships have previously been organized around common material interests. Stronger and more enduring partnerships might better be based on ideas that capture shared ambiguities of hazard, as well as material interests. Lay publics need to be engaged with contradictory concepts that exist across the full range of environmental and societal contexts in which hazards are embedded. The process of recovery from Katrina presents social scientists with an opportunity to extend inquiry and partnerships into new arenas that have the potential to sharpen intellectual understanding as well as to address needed policy reforms.