One of the problems we face in this disaster response is how bad we are at talking about values and scarcity, or maybe how reluctant. https://twitter.com/skoczela/status/1354812815148634117

Disasters create scarcity. They bottleneck supply chains, spur sudden increases in demand that supply can't keep up with, mess up transportation. Scarcity means making decisions that don't have "objective" or logical or optimal solutions. You have to make value judgments.

Examples: you have limited MREs to distribute, limited time and transport. Do you take them out to remote villages - time-consuming, but those people are less likely to get other help - or distribute them more quickly to more people in the city?

You have 300 blankets. Do you give them to:

There aren't any perfect "right" answers. But you still have to decide.

In international responses, I see these being dealt with in two ways: there are the @SpherePro minimum standards, which at least offer something to aim for. and there is the fragmentation of response among many NGOs/IOs, each with their own mission/mandate/value system.

eg, if you work for Save the Children, you know your focus should be on children & families. You can be reasonably confident other orgs are focusing on other demographics. You have your value system clearly set out, you can let others deal with the rest.

but in a domestic, State-led response this looks very different. I saw this a lot in my dissertation research on the US and Japan. There are a few problems:

For one thing, the modern State - the government - hates admitting the possibility of scarcity. That's the conclusion I came to, anyway. Eg: neither country uses the Sphere standards, even though both ask for them to be applied when funding international responses.

The disaster plans don't say "if you don't have enough x, then distribute first to a, then b, then c categories/demographics". Because the plans generally don't admit that they might not be able to provide enough, in time.

And we are bad at talking about values. In US, there's a lot of political talk that includes the word "values", but refers to things like "liberty", which has no literally specific meaning in those contexts, or "family values" which means "things that don't offend the speaker"

Neither of those are principles that one can use to make decisions in an unprecedented (to that person) situation. Disaster management, in either of the countries I studied, does not set out a clear value/ethical framework for prioritizing whom to help.

What that means is that when these hard decisions come along, as they absolutely will, it's the people on the so-to-speak frontlines who have to make those decisions, without any organizational guidance. This is a problem for a few reasons:

When these decisions are made at the local level, you end up with a patchwork of different approaches, like the state-by-state differences in vaccine priorities.

After Katrina, different counties in Mississippi had different rules for who could collect stuff from their Points of Distribution (PoDs). Some would only allow people living in that county to take stuff; others allowed anyone in.

Another problem: you end up with people low in the organization making these critical decisions. (Considering the terrible decisions frequently made by people high in government, I don't consider this as problematic, but organizationally it's not ideal)

The woman I interviewed who made PoD decisions - who would get stuff, who wouldn't - in county in Mississippi was essentially a volunteer. In a city in Japan, the person representing the city govt on logistics and distributions had been based in the tax office.

Again, that doesn't mean they were making bad decisions! But it's not the way the organization is supposed to work, which can lead to problems. Again, these were FUNDAMENTAL decisions: who gets stuff, who doesn't. And it's not like these locals were usurping: they had no guidance

and that leads to an important problem: these people - untrained in disaster response, volunteering or being assigned to help outside their expertise - were being saddled with big, difficult, painful decisions.

For more examples of how problematic this is, read @sherifink's work on hospitals in disasters.

As I said above, there are no easy solutions to these problems. People have different value systems - as they should - not to mention different personal interests, and so someone's always going to be unhappy. All the more reason to focus on process and make it transparent.

We should be having discussions - local if not national, ideally both - about how these decisions are being made and why. We should be talking about the underlying value structures they reveal and why those are different in different places.

What doesn't help is pretending that there's no decision to make, or pretending that the values used to make it are universal. That leads to resentment, anger, mistrust, a weight and blame on individuals that should be organizational.

Also in general we should be more aware of & willing to talk about ethical problems in most of our endeavors. Stop pretending there's one universal & correct value set, or an easy answer that can be calculated with enough processing power. Fund the humanities. Read diverse books.

see how hard it is? even this very scientific poll ended in a tie lol https://twitter.com/m_older/status/1355135809842778113?s=20

if you want to really geek out on this my dissertation is here https://www.theses.fr/2019IEPP0017  and I talk a lot about these issues particularly in the chapter 3 on emergency operations

also this is absolutely one of the articles I should have already written based on the diss