In Disaster By Choice (Oxford University Press, 2020), Ilan Kelman begins with a grim account of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The devastating impact of this "natural disaster," he argues, ultimately depended on "entrenched disaster vulnerabilities" that are man-made (14). Turning to episodes of wildfires and flooding in other parts of the world, he argues that natural events "become hazardous only when faced by an unnprepared society" (40). Hazards are "made" by human choice. But he also asks "whose choice?" He writes that "[v]ulnerability and poverty feed off each ofther through a lack of resources which prevents people from having choices that, if acted on, would helpt to reduce their vulnerability" (78). For example, the poor often have little choice in migrating to areas prone to hazard. As a result, responding to vulnerability requires "identifying the people, groups, politics, power games and social structures responsible for decisions to create disaster vulnerability" (95). If vulnerability is produced by choice, it can also be reduced by choice, and Kelman then investigates how certain communities (Seattle, Toronto, villages in Bangladesh) have sought to address earthquake and flooding risks.
In "Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis" (Policy & Politics, 52,1: 2-23), Aagaard, Easton and Head explore the challenges that policy advisory systems face in crisis situations. They point out that the "form and content of valued expertise is highly variable" (6) and explore how this variation shapes the quality and character of expert knowledge provided during a crisis. Two key dimensions of variation are whether policy experts are "insiders" or "outsiders" and whether expertise is provided "formally" or "informally." The authors also point out that policy experts may be seen as knowledge "shapers" or knowledge "providers," depending on how actively experts are engaged in proactively mobilzing knowledge. These and other variations in policy expertise may "facilitate or frustrate" productive relationships between experts and politicians during crises (10). This article introduces a special issue of Policy & Politics exploring the role of policy experts during COVID and Climate Change crises. A key lesson from the special issue is that "[g]overnments will choose different paths, but they all need to consider appropriate sources of expert advice during crisis, and who participates in the expertise-shaped policy conversations in crisis situations" (17).
What happens when a lawyer and a communications consultant team up to write a book about corporate crisis management? In Collaborative Crisis Management (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Thomas Cole and Paul Verbinnen argue that the overarching strategy is to "prepare, execute, recover and repeat" Preparation calls for firms to reflect on fundamental questions about the kinds of risks they might face and how prepared they are to meet these risks. Once a crisis strikes, execution require ensuring that the right teams take the lead and that issues of accountability and oversight are quickly resolved. Recovery calls for a "root cause" analysis of the crisis and its management, with a focus on reputation management. Finally, to repeat means to draw lessons from the crisis for the next possible crisis, which is nevertheless likely to be sui generis. A distinctive feature of this book is the focus on the fiduciary and legal aspects of corporate crisis management.