Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [134]
The impact of this recovery research, including studies of the National Flood Insurance Program, on public policy has been less dramatic than was the case for mitigation. Legislative proposals have been slower to develop, perhaps due to the smaller number of advocates and the difficulties involved in planning for low-probability, high-consequence events. Nevertheless, the research has stimulated some policy changes, particularly at the state level. A handful of states, such as California and Florida, now require that local communities develop pre-disaster recovery plans for future disasters. Although research into the effectiveness of these planning efforts is now under way, long-term analyses of their impact upon recovery from major disasters have yet to be done.
We still do not have a Disaster Recovery Act that is similar in scope to the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. Research on hazard and disaster policy has shown that nonincremental policy change requires both research and “agenda-setting” events. Major extreme events, such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, can become precipitating events for policy change. The research base for a Disaster Recovery Act has been undertaken and is present and available. Perhaps the ongoing recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina will serve to stimulate policy innovation. Otherwise, as Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic indicate in the Introduction to this book, disaster recovery may be one of the cases where political leaders tend to react only to crisis. So it may take another series of major natural disasters for Congress and other top decision makers to act upon this knowledge.
SUPPORT FOR RISK MANAGEMENT AND DISASTER RESEARCH AT THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Research relevant to policy emerges from many sources, including the private sector and government agencies at all levels. At the national level here in the United States, mission agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency support the work of university scholars to address issues of particular concern to the agencies. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is different in that it supports curiosity-driven basic research that may or may not have relevance to informing policy decisions.
At the NSF, many standing programs, ranging from cultural anthropology through vulcanology, occasionally support projects related to risk management and disaster research. The two programs that focus specifically on risk management and disaster research, however, are the Decision, Risk and Management Sciences Program and the Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events Program, which the present authors respectively direct. Each of these programs holds biannual competitions that NSF describes as “nonsolicited” because no specific solicitations of research questions are published. Indeed, the program announcements deliberately avoid identifying specific topics within the broad frameworks of scholarly activity that are funded by the programs. The intention is to give scholars leeway in which to argue that their proposed projects will produce significant new knowledge or methodological advances, rather than having program officers predetermine which topics or methods within the fields are most likely to lead to new discoveries. In a sense, this approach is aligned with the view of researchers as problem inventors rather than problem solvers that Howard Raiffa advocates in his chapter.
We should not infer from the NSF’s focus on basic research that NSF-FUNDED research does not inform policy makers. On the contrary, the discoveries of NSF-funded scholars have directly influenced policies as diverse as the adoption of new methods for auctions by the Federal Communication Commission, the design of disaster warning messages, and cap-and-trade programs for pollution control. Aside from intellectual merit,