Content uploaded by Thomas A. Birkland
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Thomas A. Birkland
Content may be subject to copyright.
Is Federalism the Reason for Policy Failure
in Hurricane Katrina?
Thomas Birkland* a nd Sarah Waterman
†
Governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina are generally cited as policy failures. Media and
popular analyses focus on the federal government’s policy failures in hazard preparedness,
response, and recovery. Meanwhile, disaster experts realize that disaster response is a shared
intergovernmental responsibility. We examine the federal nature of natural disaster policy in the
US to consider whether federalism, or other factors, had the greatest influence on the failures
in Katrina. We find that some policy failures are related to policy design considerations bas ed in
federalism, but that the national focus on ‘‘homeland security’’and the concomitant reduction in
attention to natural hazards and disasters, are equally, if not more complicit, in the erosion of
government disaster management capacity that was revealed in Hurricane Katrina.
As the most expensive natural disaster in American history and one of the deadliest
in recent memory, Hurricane Katrina has been seared in the American psyche
unlike any other natural disaster. Of particular note is the extent to which the
response to Katrina has been cast as a failure of federal initiative and organization,
notwithstanding the inherently intergovernmental nature of disaster preparedness,
response, recovery, and mitigation in the US. The criticism has been particularly
heated given the reforms occasioned by another ‘‘focusing event’’ (Kingdon 1995;
Birkland 1997): The September 11 attacks and the concomitant focus on
‘‘homeland security,’’ to the detriment of preparedness for and response to natural
hazards. Since August 2005, Americans, their elected representatives, and the news
media have pointedly asked, ‘‘If the federal government cannot prepare for
something like Katrina, how can it prepare for a major act of terrorism?’’ Of
course, the mantra of failure, reinforced by media coverage of the supposed overall
failure of response to Katrina, failed to consider the things that worked in Katrina.
Martha Derthick includes the pre-storm evacuation and the search and rescue
*North Carolina State University; tom_birkland@ncsu.e du, tom.birkland@gmail.c om
University of North Carolina, School of Government; sjwaterman@gmail.com
Publius: The Journalof Federalism
volume 38 number 4, pp.692^714
doi:10.1093/publius/pjn020
AdvanceAccess publication 29 July2008
ßTheAuthor 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSFAssoc iates: Publius, Inc.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
function as success stories that involved considerable intergovernmental
coordination (Derthick 2007). But Derthick also notes the failure of flood
protection, another intergovernmental function.
The broader failure of disaster mitigation, preparedness, and response was
manifest in Katrina. The nature of federalism and intergovernmental relations,
particularly post-September 11, has been implicated in these failures (Tierney
2005). This article explores potential explanations for governmental failure during
Hurricane Katrina, including federalism, policy, and administrative failures. The
creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) led to substantial changes
in the nature of the federal–state–local relationship in emergency management.
These changes appear to have validated fears raised by critics before Hurricane
Katrina that the reorganization designed to respond to terrorism would undermine
the nation’s ability to respond to natural disasters (Tierney, Bevc, and Kuligowski
2006; Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola 2007). The important question, then, is this:
Were the failures in Hurricane Katrina a result of federalism or of a particular style
of federalism that characterizes disaster policy in the US? Or did these failures
simply reflect the inherent difficulties in preparing for, responding to, and
recovering from catastrophes?
Although former eras of federalism were conceptualized as cooperative or
competitive (Grodzins 1966), coercive federalism and opportunistic federalism
(Conlan 2006) are two terms that might be profitably applied to homeland security
and issues raised in Hurricane Katrina. Coercive federalism describes how federal
regulations, federal mandates imposed on the states, and federal preemption of
state authority seek to compel state and local governments to comply with federal
standards in the pursuit of national goals (Kincaid 1990, 1996; Conlan 2006;
Posner 2007). Many states have claimed that post-September 11 policy is coercive
in that it attaches strings to federal preparedness aid.
But coercive federalism is potentially misleading for at least two reasons. First,
it is difficult to make as strong a case for coercion in disaster policy as one can
make in transportation policy [the uniform drinking age mandates, tied to federal
funding (Liebschutz 1985)] or in education [No Child Left Behind (Krane 2002)].
These are relatively high-salience issues, with rather clear linkages between state and
local behavior and their receipt of federal funds. Natural hazards policies are much
lower salience to most people, except on rare occasions, which makes disaster
policy the province of technical experts more than political leaders (May 1990).
The failure of local governments to follow mandates related to natural hazards,
then, is likely to be unaccompanied by much citizen attention. The one exception
may be in the flood insurance program, where communities that fail to take certain
mitigation steps will make themselves ineligible for highly subsidized federal flood
insurance. Even then, what undermines the coercion argument is the political
utility of disaster aid for the president and members of Congress, all of whom
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 693
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
enjoy claiming credit for funneling money to local governments after disasters.
After September 11, there was some coercion in tying various forms of aid to
adoption of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and adherence to
the National Response Plan (NRP), now known as the National Response
Framework (NRF). But this mild coercion is accompanied by generous federal
funding for ‘‘homeland security’’ activities. This funding is basically redistributive
(pork) spending rather than spending based on a risk or needs assessment, making
such funding an attractive way to spend federal money locally.
Second, while many programs look like coercion, state and local governments
have rather willingly ceded leadership and funding to federal authority, particularly
given the promise of vast funding flowing from Washington to the states under the
‘‘homeland security’’ rubric, as well as the desire to be seen as doing their share
(Posner 2007, 397).
A potentially more satisfactory model of federalism, which avoids the assumed
heavy handedness of coercion and the sometimes naı
¨ve assumption of shared goals,
is called opportunistic federalism, which Conlan (2006) defines as
a system that allows—and often encourages—actors in the system to pursue
their immediate interests with little regard for the institutional or collective
consequences. For example, federal mandates, policy preemptions, and highly
prescriptive federal grant programs tend to be driven by opportunistic policy
makers who seek to achieve their own policy and political goals regardless
of traditional norms of behavior or boundaries of institutional responsibility
(p. 667).
This idea of opportunistic federalism is entirely consistent with the
‘‘opportunistic’’ and episodic nature of nearly all disaster policy, since disaster
and crisis policy is almost entirely event-driven, decisions are made rapidly, and
policies are often adopted without considering their long-term influence on
fundamental constitutional and institutional arrangements. This is an excellent
description of federal disaster policy since September 11. In the process of creating
the DHS, Congress, with the president’s assent, moved FEMA into the new agency
without regard for its existing organizational and intergovernmental relationships.
Furthermore, homeland security ‘‘experts’’ (many of whom had little experience in
this new field) made policy in nearly complete ignorance of the vast amounts of
knowledge accumulated by social scientists and practitioners on how people and
organizations behave in disasters. The creators of the new homeland security
establishment were driven by political and policy goals—in particular, the need
to act quickly to bolster ‘‘homeland security’’—rather than by a desire to
understand whether the entire disaster preparedness, response, and recovery system
really needed to be overhauled at all, or whether small parts needed reform to
work better.
694 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
The creation of the DHS as it eventually emerged laid the shaky foundation for
intergovernmental response that had been partially built before Katrina. This
foundation, to be sure, was not undermined solely by opportunistic federalism, but
by a patchwork of relationships between and among governments that combined
features of coercion and cooperation in ways that were not yet well established after
September 11 (McGuire 2006). These relationships reveal challenges of network
governance at least as much, if not more, than they reveal problems with the
federal nature of disaster policy and practice (Scavo, Kearney, and Kilroy 2008).
A Short History of Intergovernmental Disaster Policy
Well into the twentieth century, disaster response, relief, and recovery were
primarily a state and local function, with relatively few exceptions (Sylves and
Cumming 2004; Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola 2007; Sylves 2007). This is true for
constitutional and practical reasons: State and local governments are almost always
‘‘first’’ at the scene, regardless of the event, from a house fire to the September 11
attacks (Schneider 2008). Nor is it entirely clear that there was a great deal of
demand among civic leaders for outside aid—federal or otherwise—after disasters.
In many communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, civic
leaders resisted seeking aid to avoid the perception that a community had been
destroyed and that business opportunities were lost (Steinberg 2000). Instead, the
emphasis was often placed on the appearance of resilience and rebuilding, even
when that rebuilding increased vulnerability, such as in San Francisco, where the
Marina District is built on loose fill that was originally a dump for debris from the
1906 earthquake (Geschwind 2001; Winchester 2005).
Increased federal attention to emergency management is rooted in preparations
taken during the Second World War to prevent damage from potential enemy
bombing (Kreps 1990). The Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 made national
security a federal priority and the province of federal action; this act followed the
first Soviet nuclear weapons test in 1949. By the mid-1960s the development of
powerful bombs and missiles made it clear that civil defense against nuclear war
was fruitless.
At the same time, the civil defense orientation began to shift toward greater
federal attention to natural hazards, due, in large part, to key focusing events such
as the 1964 Alaska earthquake and Hurricane Camille, which struck Louisiana and
Mississippi in 1969 (Waugh 2000). Camille led to the Disaster Relief Act of 1969,
while in 1972 Hurricane Agnes led to the Disaster Relief Act of 1974, which
provided for relief assistance to local governments and to individual victims. The
Alaska earthquake starkly revealed the extent of damage to communities in sparsely
populated places; a ‘‘smaller’’ earthquake—on the Richter scale—in California
would yield a much worse outcome, as revealed in the 1971 San Fernando quake.
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 695
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Both of these events led to an explicit mention of disaster ‘‘mitigation’’ in the 1974
Disaster Relief Act.
The 1974 act also made clear that responsibility for planning for and responding
to disasters was retained by the state and local governments. This reflects the era’s
notions of ‘‘New Federalism,’’ which devolved decision making to the states while
retaining the federal funding functions, an approach May and Williams (1986) call
‘‘shared governance.’’
The Carter administration sought to shrink ‘‘big government’’ through
deregulation and through government reorganizations that aimed to achieve
greater efficiencies. In this spirit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) was formed in 1979 to bring together disparate disaster functions into
one agency. The Reagan Administration believed that the young agency should be
devoted more to creating ‘‘fantasy plans’’ for continuity of government and nuclear
preparedness than to natural disaster preparedness and response (Clarke 1999).
FEMA became known as a poorly performing ‘‘turkey farm’’ because of the Reagan
and G. H. W. Bush Administrations’ use of FEMA as a source of patronage jobs for
third-rate political appointees (Murray 2001; Tierney 2005). FEMA largely ignored
natural disasters, even though the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act
(NEHRA) had indicated that FEMA was the lead disaster response agency in the
case of major earthquakes. Indeed, Julius Becton, FEMA director from 1985 to
1989, ranked earthquakes, hurricane, and flood programs at the bottom of FEMA’s
program priorities (Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola 2007).
The Stafford Act and Federalism
The notion of disaster policy as ‘‘shared governance’’ is reflected in the Robert T.
Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, PL 100-707,
hereinafter the Stafford Act. The history and evolution of this legislation has been
treated elsewhere (Sapat 2001; Sylves and Cumming 2004; National Research
Council 2006; Sylves 2007), so we will discuss the law as it existed in August 2005,
when Hurricane Katrina made landfall. This law is also embedded in the broader
‘‘homeland security’’ rubric.
The passage of the Stafford Act was a relatively clear statement of how the
federal government viewed its role vis-a
`-vis states and localities in natural disaster
policy and in a post-Cold War world. Amendments to the Stafford Act in 1993 and
2000 were intended to improve its performance and to stress mitigation, but these
amendments did not alter the understanding that the state and local governments
were ‘‘first responders’’ in nearly all disasters.
A widespread misconception among citizens, journalists, and some members of
Congress is that the federal government, under the Stafford Act, is primarily
responsible for disaster relief and recovery services. Congress’s intent in the Stafford
696 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Act, on the other hand, is quite clear in 42 USC 5121(b), which notes that
Congress aims ‘‘to provide an orderly and continuing means of assistance by the
federal government to state and local governments.’’ This passage underscores the
prominent role of state and local governments. The four types of assistance include
‘‘encourag[ing] the development of ...plans by the States and by local govern-
ments,’’ ‘‘coordination,’’ ‘‘encouraging individuals, States, and local governments to
protect themselves ...,’’ and encouraging mitigation efforts. These are all matters of
assistance, not federal prescription. Most of the policy tools used to achieve these
ends are quasi-market-based, such as flood insurance, or incentive-based, such as
tying the availability of hazard mitigation funds to state and local planning (Section
322 of the Stafford Act, as amended by the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000).
Indeed, the history of the Stafford Act suggests that federal law was moving toward
a more cooperative model involving disaster professionals at all levels and was not
solely a federal initiative.
Title II of the Stafford Act addresses preparedness, while Title III deals with
emergency provisions during a disaster. Title III, in particular, indicates that state
governors initiate requests for aid. Mitigation was strengthened in amendments
enacted in 2000. The key mitigation program is the ‘‘322 program,’’ codified at 42
USC 5165. In exchange for increased federal funding, the 322 program requires
states and localities to submit mitigation plans to FEMA. If these plans are in effect
during the disaster, more funding is available upon approval of the president,
acting through FEMA. This provides a planning incentive but certainly does not
compel communities to adopt plans. Historically, local attention to hazard
mitigation has lagged behind attention to other, seemingly more pressing matters
(Rossi, Wright, and Weber-Burdin 1982; Alesch and Petak 1986; May and Birkland
1994). It is doubtful that the mitigation programs under the Stafford Act have had
much influence on state decision making in the absence of other reasons, unique to
each state, for concern with disaster mitigation.
Post-Stafford Act Disaster Policy
After the enactment of the Stafford Act, FEMA slowly turned its attention to
natural disasters; it was forced to turn more quickly in the aftermath of Hurricane
Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake, both in 1989, and Hurricane Andrew in
1992. The loudest complaints about FEMA came during the two hurricanes.
Senator Ernest ‘‘Fritz’’ Hollings famously called FEMA the ‘‘sorriest bunch of
bureaucratic jackasses’’ (Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola 2007, p. 9) because of
FEMA’s slow response. The response to Hurricane Andrew was equally deficient,
with one local official crying out for help: ‘‘Where in the hell is the cavalry on
this one? They keep saying we’re going to get supplies. For God’s sake, where
are they?’’
1
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 697
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
President Clinton learned important political lessons from Hurricane Andrew, as
reflected in his appointment of FEMA director James Lee Witt, under whom FEMA
embarked on a strategy to improve performance and the agency’s reputation.
The federal government became more generous in its definitions of disasters
eligible for federal assistance, a decision that was politically popular but that also
lowered federal expectations about the local share of disaster preparedness and
management funding and effort. This sort of opportunistic federalism was
supported by states and localities, which were able to shift a great deal of the fiscal
burden of disaster to the federal government. Second, greater attention was given
to hazard mitigation, resulting in a Mitigation Directorate in 1994 and, in 1997, a
cooperative project with state and, in particular, local governments called Project
Impact. Because Project Impact was initiated by FEMA and engaged cities and
counties directly, one can argue that this initiative was itself a form of oppo-
rtunistic federalism, in which FEMA sought to circumvent state governments and
work directly with localities. Many states resisted this model, albeit not loudly,
given the perception that some benefit might accrue from Project Impact. But it
cannot be denied that Project Impact, like many federal programs starting in the
1960s, circumvented states and therefore had significant ‘‘opportunistic’’ features.
Mitigation goals also meshed well with sound scientific environmental
management; nonstructural mitigation efforts were seen as being able to achieve
both mitigation and environmental and ecological goals (Birkland et al. 2003).
These programs were intended to be federal-state partnerships, and while resources
were made available by the federal government, some of the states took obvious
leadership roles in mitigation and preparedness of particular hazards, such as
California and earthquakes, and Florida and North Carolina and hurricanes
(Godschalk et al. 2000; Birkland 2006, ch. 4). The federal government dominated
relief and recovery funding. These efforts also meshed well with federal devolution
goals.
FEMA, September 11, and the Homeland Security Establishment
There is substantial reason to believe that many gains made in natural hazard
mitigation and preparedness at all levels of government have been lost as FEMA
and natural hazards programs across agencies have been overshadowed by efforts to
address real or perceived ‘‘homeland security’’ threats. FEMA was complicit, in
some ways, in this degradation of capacity. James Lee Witt initially discouraged
FEMA involvement in terrorism, fearing a return to FEMA’s civil defense function
but later raised significant concerns when the Office of Domestic Preparedness
(ODP) was created in the Justice Department, charged with preparedness for all
manner of mass casualty incidents (Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola 2007, ch. 1).
698 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
The major problem at FEMA post-2001 was not its existence, its location within
the bureaucracy, or the nature of its staff. What changed after 2001 was the quality
of its leadership and, more to the point, the administration’s attitudes toward its
mission. It was clear that the Bush administration was unlikely to actively promote
the sorts of disaster preparedness and mitigation measures that had been proven at
least moderately successful in the 1990s; it cut funding for the various Stafford Act
mitigation programs and terminated Project Impact.
Russell Hanson notes that the September 11 attacks caused the national
government to ‘‘once again [assert] leadership in domestic policy making’’
(Hanson 2004, 31). As Hanson further notes, the centralization or diffusion of
government power to and from the federal government and the states ebbs and
flows with events and ideological currents in American life. By defining homeland
security as ‘‘national security,’’ and by defining emergency management and
disaster response as ‘‘homeland security events’’ (the larger of which are known as
‘‘events of national significance’’ in the NRP), a strong connection is made between
natural disasters and the broader ‘‘homeland security’’ rubric. It seems almost
inevitable that there has therefore been a recentralization of the emergency
management function—particularly in the leadership of this function—in the
federal government (Scavo, Kearney and Kilroy, 2008).
We claim this is a ‘‘recentralization’’ because the emergency management system
in the US has, except for the Clinton–Witt anomaly in the 1990s, been focused on
the civil defense aspect of national security. In the 1950s through the 1980s, the key
fear was nuclear war; today it is terrorism. While the US has never experienced a
catastrophic nuclear attack, a mass casualty act of biological terrorism, or any other
catastrophe that entirely disabled a large city or metropolitan area, the September
11 attacks moved such events from a theoretical possibility to a very real threat
with palpable consequences.
Even though the immediate response in New York and at the Pentagon was
quite successful, the Bush administration reframed the whole emergency
management function within the broader ‘‘homeland security’’ framework. To be
fair, President Bush was not initially in favor of the creation of a DHS, but it
was politically difficult to block this idea and to block the inclusion of FEMA in
the DHS. Perhaps a more astute president would have sought to keep FEMA out of
the DHS, just as key functions of the FBI and CIA were left out of the new
agency. Even before September 11, it was quite clear that the president did not see
FEMA as an important or useful organization. Thus, strategies and tactics for
improving homeland security were at odds with local emergency management
strategies in many ways. While DHS officials tended to think of disaster
management as born on September 11, 2001, so that all decisions and plans are
novel, local emergency managers frame it as a 200-year-old idea with well-
established practices.
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 699
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
The creation of the DHS gutted FEMA. Senior personnel left the agency, and
many managers either were reassigned within the DHS, left to form consultancies,
or departed simply because they were displeased with the new direction.
Meanwhile, the federal government was making promises it was unprepared
to keep. FEMA continued to operate as if it were a ‘‘partner’’ in emergency
management, even as the DHS was inexpertly calling the shots. The FEMA director
is now a subcabinet official with no formal access to the president (Derthick 2007,
37) and a reporting line that passes through the DHS secretary.
The DHS’s focus on terrorism continues largely unabated despite the problems
revealed by Hurricane Katrina, as reflected in the revised National Strategy for
Homeland Security (Homeland Security Council 2007), which claims to have
applied ‘‘the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.’’ Even after the revelations of the
department’s and FEMA’s shortcomings in Hurricane Katrina, the strategy puts the
‘‘war on terrorism’’ on center stage, with disaster preparedness as a secondary
aspect of policy:
America is at war with terrorist enemies who are intent on attacking our
Homeland and destroying our way of life. The lives and livelihoods of the
American people also remain at risk from natural catastrophes, including
naturally occurring infectious diseases and hazards such as hurricanes and
earthquakes, and man-made accidents.
The halfhearted ‘‘all hazards’’ rhetoric led local governments and citizens to
believe the DHS was at least minimally aware of their needs. Indeed, there was
clearly a great deal of communication between FEMA/DHS and local governments
over homeland security and emergency management matters, and federal aid to
state and local emergency management functions actually increased considerably
after September 11. But this aid was mostly related to putative terrorist threats,
such as chemical and biological warfare, and that aid was at least initially not
distributed on the basis of objective analysis of the risks posed by either natural
disasters or terrorism.
Furthermore, the key federal agency involved in hurricane mitigation in New
Orleans—the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—was not particularly vocal about its
concerns over the resources it had available to maintain and inspect the levees for
which it was responsible. Before the hurricane, the Corps had sought to induce
the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board to install floodgates at the end of the
drainage canals. Having failed in its efforts to mitigate the storm surge hazard with
these floodgates, the Corps built flood walls along the canals that were known to be
structurally deficient (Seed et al. 2006; van Heerden and Bryan 2006). Furthermore,
the Corps minimized the hazards posed by the so-called Mister Go (MRGO, or
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) channel, which exposed New Orleans to substantial
danger from storm surge and did significant environmental harm in exchange for
700 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
providing a seventy-mile shortcut for ships passing from the Gulf to New Orleans
(van Heerden and Bryan 2006; van Heerden 2007).
We can say with confidence that the federal government’s attitude toward
assisting communities before and after natural disasters has changed considerably
since 2001, yet the public pronouncements from FEMA and, particularly, from the
DHS suggest that it will continue its pre-2001 mission of rapid response to natural
disasters. This message was reinforced by the largely successful FEMA responses to
the extremely active 2004 hurricane season, in which four hurricanes in relatively
quick succession struck Florida. Both FEMA and the State of Florida responded
effectively to these storms, creating the impression that FEMA was prepared to
handle disasters of this scale. The comparison is misleading, however: Each 2004
storm was relatively small compared with Katrina, and the State of Florida was
much better prepared to handle the storms than Louisiana was in 2005.
Furthermore, Katrina was a remarkably large storm that likely would have
overwhelmed any jurisdiction it struck, but FEMA’s shortcomings seemed
particularly painful in light of reassurances that the agency was still focused on
its mission.
The Roles of Government and Perceptions in Hurricane Katrina
Theories of federalism can help explain intergovernmental policy design. They can
also help structure our analysis of how and why policy is or is not well
implemented. But in the case of Hurricane Katrina and natural disaster policy in
general, public perceptions of how the system should work are incongruent with
expert and elite understandings of how the intergovernmental system actually
does work.
A casual observer of news coverage of Hurricane Katrina could hypothesize that
the federal government is likely to take a considerable amount of blame for the
policy failures revealed by the storm. The perceived failure to evacuate New
Orleans, the failure to address the vulnerable levees, and the failure to properly
respond to victims’ need for shelter all fed the idea that the federal government
deserves a great deal of blame.
A preliminary test of the hypothesis that the public placed greater blame for
failure on the federal government is shown in table 1, which summarizes responses
to the following question, posed by a CBS News/New York Times poll
2
to a national
sample:
In New Orleans, after the Hurricane [Katrina], hundreds of thousands of
people [sic] were unable to evacuate the flooded city and they lacked food,
water, and shelter. Who would you say was most to blame for those
conditions?
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 701
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
While the question was based on the entirely false claim that ‘‘hundreds of
thousands of people were unable to evacuate,’’ one could suppose that this oddly
worded and factually incorrect question would reflect poorly on state and local
officials if respondents correctly assigned evacuation responsibilities to the local
government. Instead, nearly one year after the disaster, 37 percent of respondents
cited federal agencies as most at fault, even though FEMA and the federal
government have no formal responsibility for planning and conducting
evacuations. While state government garners slightly more criticism in the 2006
poll compared with 2005, a plurality of respondents blame the federal executive
branch and FEMA for the poor response to the storm.
This result is consistent with the literature on news-media agenda setting and
blame fixing in crises and disasters. Major national and regional newspapers orient
coverage toward nationally prominent elite actors and the issues these actors
believe are most important. Furthermore, Molotch and Lester (1975) found that
large events—in their study, the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill—are opportunities for
journalists and their sources to create meaning; news in this sense serves as
‘‘tracings or residues that can be used to reveal the purposes and programs of the
social actors who had practical reasons for producing one sort of news instead of
another’’ (p. 236). A key actor in this process, of course, is the media, which focus
on news that fits preexisting frames, seek to portray tension and drama, and want
news that is relatively cheap and easy to produce. Disaster news is dramatic, visual,
cheap to produce, and rife with story frames such as damage, looting, and disorder,
many of which are exaggerated or simply untrue (Tierney 2005; Tierney, Bevc, and
Kuligowski 2006). At the same time, part of the drama of news is institutional
conflict, and with conflict come heroes and villains. Since the ‘‘good guys’’ of
Table 1 Assessment of blame following Hurricane Katrina
August 25, 2006 (%) September 15, 2005 (%)
Federal government/FEMA/Bush 37 29
City government/New Orleans/Mayor 20 20
State government/Louisiana/Governor 19 12
Residents of New Orleans 2 12
Government—all levels 1 12
Mother Nature/the weather 1 –
Nothing 1 –
Other 7 –
Do not know/no answer 0 9
N1,206 1,167
Source: CBS News via the Polling the Nations database.
702 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Hurricane Katrina are usually portrayed as the victims, the villains likely come
from outside the area, and thus the federal government is cast in this role.
Journalists seized on FEMA as the failed agency, both because FEMA’s performance
provided plenty of fodder for this frame, and because the frame was already
constructed after FEMA’s failures in Hurricane Andrew.
There are other reasons for the focus on national news. National news products
are unlikely to parse the intricacies of intergovernmental relations given common
news frames such as conflict, drama, and ‘‘normalization’’ of news within a narrow
ideological range (Bennett and Lawrence 1995; Bennett 2003). Thus, these usual
frames are employed despite their unsuitability to the questions at hand, and the
blame-fixing process largely stops when an easily identified scapegoat is isolated.
Does Hurricane Katrina look like other crisis-driven news, in which the news
media focus primarily on federal and elite actors? In table 2, we compare news
coverage of various actors and institutions in three papers: The local paper in the
disaster area, the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the leading national newspaper, the
New York Times; and a fairly typical regional newspaper outside of the disaster
area, in this case, the Seattle Times.
3
We also analyzed transcripts of news coverage
from the major broadcast networks, the top two cable news networks (Fox and
CNN), and National Public Radio (NPR), an ‘‘elite’’ broadcaster.
In this analysis, we do not attempt to assess blame fixing in these outlets; rather,
we seek to understand how much coverage of Hurricane Katrina included at least a
mention of key institutional actors at the federal, state, and local levels. We used a
conservative standard for selecting stories: We searched for the terms listed below
within twenty words of ‘‘Katrina’’ in the headlines and lead paragraphs. This search
strategy was applied to both electronic and print media.
Table 2 Media coverage of Hurricane Katrina
Times-Picayune Seattle Times New York Times
LexisNexis Search Term (%) N(%) N(%) N
President Bush 12 123 35 16 48 97
Nagin 24 255 13 6 10 21
Blanco 18 188 4 2 8 16
FEMA 28 303 35 16 10 20
Congress 15 160 11 5 23 46
N1,065 46 201
Source: LexisNexis database from August 26, 2005 to August 31, 2007. Search was defined as the
institutional actor in question within 20 words of the term ‘‘Katrina’’ in headlines and lead
paragraphs only. Double counting is possible, yielding percentages 4100%.
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 703
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
The amount of coverage in the Times-Picayune mentioning FEMA is only
slightly greater than that mentioning Mayor Ray Nagin, and the amount of
coverage mentioning President Bush with respect to Hurricane Katrina is quite low,
only 12 percent, or about one-third that in the Seattle Times and one-fourth that in
the New York Times. The latter, in contrast, largely focuses the Katrina story on the
president himself, with additional coverage of Congress in its institutional role.
FEMA and the president enjoy equal coverage in the Seattle Times. FEMA’s
counterpart in Louisiana, the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency
Preparedness, receives very little attention, while Governor Blanco is substantially
more intensively covered in the Times-Picayune than in the other papers.
One can conclude that the Times-Picayune reflects a more accurate
understanding of the role of federalism in emergency management. While the
president and FEMA get a great deal of attention, so do the responsible local
actors, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco. The Seattle Times focuses much more
on the dominant popular treatment of the disaster: the presumably poor
performance of Bush and FEMA. The New York Times, on the other hand, appears
to be covering the topic as a matter of conflict between the executive and legislative
branches, as befits the Times’ focus on national political news and political conflict.
Remarkably little coverage mentions Louisiana’s state and local officials.
The electronic media, including NPR, show a strong tendency to focus their
attention on FEMA and on the president, with remarkably less attention paid to
state and local actors. For example, 44 percent of the CBS and NBC news coverage
was on FEMA and 29 percent and 37 percent, respectively were on President Bush.
Some 44 percent of NPR’s coverage was on President Bush. Were one to consume
only regional and national news aside from the Times-Picayune, regardless of the
particular outlet, one would conclude that the major actors in Katrina are federal,
ignoring the role of state and local governments. This tendency is much more
pronounced in the electronic media.
We find that FEMA and the executive branch of the federal government are foci
of much more discussion than are other branches of government, even though
disaster response is designed as ‘‘shared governance.’’ Only the Times-Picayune
appears to have reflected this sense of shared responsibility in its reporting, while
the examples of coverage in elite national and mass market regional outlets suggest
much greater attention to the executive branch. The most focus on FEMA was in
national TV news, where the focus on FEMA dominates (and, indeed, becomes the
trope for) the institutional discussion of the disaster. Interestingly, the DHS, whose
secretary bears statutory and regulatory responsibility for FEMA’s performance
(under the NRP), is largely let off the hook by the media and the public; of course,
the public’s attitude is very likely shaped by the way the media frame the debate,
and the Secretary of Homeland Security is not often mentioned because relief is
still the responsibility of the preexisting, but now reorganized, FEMA.
704 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Further reflected in public opinion is the extent to which a credulous public
took up the stories that overemphasized mis-, mal-, or nonfeasance and
underemphasized the successful aspects of the preparations and response to
Katrina, such as the relatively successful evacuation of hundreds of thousands of
people from the region and the successes of the Coast Guard and the Louisiana
Department of Fish and Wildlife (Derthick 2007).
Explanations for Perceived Federal Policy Failure
The normative question raised by the above analysis is this: Why do people blame
the federal government more than they do state and local government for the
apparent failures in Hurricane Katrina? Potential explanations for the Katrina
policy failures reveal a great deal about policy design within and across various
levels of government. These explanations are neither definitive nor mutually
exclusive. We can define the policy failure as the inability of federal, state, and local
governments to take the appropriate steps to mitigate, prepare for, and respond to
Hurricane Katrina. The successful application of these aspects of disaster policy
leads to disaster-resilient communities that can ‘‘bounce back’’ from disasters. New
Orleans, just on population figures alone, cannot be said to have returned to its
pre-Katrina state. On these measures, policy failure is clear. What is not yet clear is
precisely how and why these policies failed, given the interconnected nature of
communities and of cascading failures.
The Federal Government Objectively Failed
One reason why many people thought that the federal government failed in its
perceived duties is because there is evidence that the federal government did fail in
fundamental ways. FEMA’s response was slow, and then FEMA director Michael
Brown was portrayed as being foolish and out of touch. Later analyses suggested
that he was significantly constrained by higher ups in the DHS (Cooper and Block
2006), and major questions were raised about why the federal government lacked
essential supplies and equipment in staging areas much nearer to New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast.
Additional questions were raised about the nature of the new NRP, the main
federal guidance document that supplanted the former Federal Response Plan
(FRP). The NRP was clearly written with catastrophic terrorism in mind, and in
the views of most state emergency managers it had significant problems. The plan,
adopted in early 2005, muted these objections. The final draft of the NRP was even
worse than the one first promulgated; it sought to centralize nearly all disaster
response in the federal government, a model that turned the entire emergency
management system, and the profession itself, on its head.
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 705
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Furthermore, the NRP was a lengthy document—over 400 pages long, including
various annexes—and many parts of it were unintelligible to local responders and
other federal agencies. The NRP was drafted with relatively little FEMA and state
and local participation, and the roles that all actors would take in emergency
response, in particular, were unclear. In essence, the NRP tore asunder long-
standing institutional relationships that worked reasonably well before Katrina. The
controversies over the creation of the NRP, and its obvious practical shortcomings,
contradicted DHS claims that FEMA and the DHS would continue to pursue an
‘‘all hazards’’ approach to both terrorism and natural disasters.
The Storm was so Overwhelming that any Response would Fail, no Matter who
was in Charge
Another reason for the fixing of blame on the federal government recognizes that
the hurricane’s damage was so profound that it quickly overtaxed the ability of
Orleans Parish, the neighboring parishes, and the State of Louisiana to effectively
respond. One can then make one of two arguments. First, the federal government
was inevitably overwhelmed by this catastrophic event, just because the disaster was
very big, affecting the Gulf Coast from south-central Louisiana through Mississippi
to Mobile, Alabama (Quarantelli 2005). The second ‘‘causal story’’ (Stone 1989) is
that the federal government was overwhelmed because, despite assurances to the
contrary, it was ill equipped and unable to respond to a disaster of this magnitude.
While this has substantially disturbing consequences—if the federal government
cannot respond to Hurricane Katrina, how could it handle an act of catastrophic
terrorism?—this is less a question of federalism than it is of preparedness
organization within the national government. After all, the provision of aid to
communities that have been overwhelmed by catastrophic events is at the very
heart of the federal role in the emergency management system, and the possibility
of a catastrophic event is exactly why the NRP was created.
Conflicting Federal and Local Policy Goals
Another candidate explanation for failure is the classic conflict in federal systems:
the conflict between federal and state goals. The state and local emergency
managers, even after September 11, took the ‘‘all hazards’’ approach much more
seriously than the federal government did. The National Strategy for Homeland
Security (Homeland Security Council 2007), which still focuses on the ‘‘war on
terrorism,’’ speaks for itself; meanwhile, the state and local governments have
consistently recognized that they are much more likely to have to address a range
of natural and technological hazards and disasters as well as terrorism. The federal
government’s focus on civil defense is therefore neither orthogonal to nor
congruent with state and local goals. This stands in rather sharp contrast to the
706 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
situation during the 1990s, when there was considerably more cooperation between
the federal, state, and local governments. One can therefore say that federal policy,
on the one hand, and state and local policy, on the other, have been significantly
divergent since 2001.
Beyond the question of response, however, one must consider the federal role in
facilitating development in hazardous areas, and the intergovernmental role in
persuading people that they were probably safer than they really were. Ray Burby
(2006) calls these the ‘‘safe development’’ and the ‘‘local government’’ paradoxes.
In the first, Burby argues that the federal government, through many subsidies and
incentives, including flood insurance, levees, tax deductions for casualty losses, and
generous disaster relief, encourages development in areas that would not otherwise
be developed if the risk profile of the area were undistorted by these incentives.
People whose risk perceptions are altered in this way are said to be susceptible to
‘‘moral hazard,’’ in which people take risks they would not ordinarily assume
because they believe that the additional risk is attenuated by the protection
provided by government. Of course, these decisions may well be distorted by
perceptions: Building behind a levee may provide the illusion of safety, but the
probability of the levee’s failing because of poor design, poor construction, poor
maintenance, or exceeding the ‘‘design flood’’ (that is, the maximum flood level
assumed in the design) are not often considered in the risk calculation. One can
certainly argue that vulnerable areas are ‘‘safer’’ from routine events, such as
‘‘nuisance flooding,’’ but whether an area is truly ‘‘safe’’ is a matter of probability
just like any other risk.
The local government paradox suggests that even when the federal government
wants to more aggressively address hazards, the state and local governments must
implement federal ideas for mitigation. Students of intergovernmental relations and
policy implementation know that designing such policies is very difficult; Malcolm
Goggin and his colleagues argued in 1990 that intergovernmental policy
implementation is more likely to be successful when credible policy designers
communicate clear and credible signals to capable implementers whose interests are
congruent with those of the policy originator (Goggin et al. 1990). Unfortunately,
the interests of the federal government are not clear, inconsistent, and not clearly
communicated. Even when an incentive, such as the Hazard Mitigation Grant
Program, is provided, it may not be taken up by the local governments, or their
ideas of what constitutes sound mitigation may not be congruent with those of
federal policymakers.
At the same time, the paradox of local development is also at work. The costs of
nearly all effective preparedness and mitigation measures are borne by state and
especially local governments in at least two ways: In the funds that have to be
expended to execute these plans, and in the loss of tax revenue and other economic
activity that accompanies allowing for land development. The promise of increased
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 707
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
revenues was what induced the Orleans Parish levee board to use levees more as a
way of creating new developable land than as a hazard mitigation measure (Cooper
and Block 2006). This problem is not unique to New Orleans; all manner of
communities, particularly those running out of the safest land on which to build,
experience the same pressures, and given that local property tax revenues are the
major source of municipal revenue, and that urban ‘‘growth machines’’ (Logan and
Molotch 1988) work with civic leaders to promote development in unsafe areas
(May 1995; Burby et al. 1996, 1999; Burby 1998, 2006).
Excessive Policy Demand
While the government at many levels failed in Katrina, it is also possible that
citizens’ expectations are too great, particularly in relation to their apparent
unwillingness to take self-protective measures. One reason for policy failure is
‘‘excessive policy demand’’ (Ingram and Mann 1980). That is, some citizens and
their leaders call on government to do more than it is able to as a function of
resource constraints, limits on governmental authority, or limits on political
feasibility. In the first instance, while the federal government has vast resources at
its disposal, these resources are not unlimited and often are the object of
competition for other needs. Furthermore, at least theoretically, there are limits to
what government can do in terms of the usurpation of state and local functions,
the role of law enforcement officials, and the like. And some obvious responses to
disasters, such as forced evacuations or forced expropriation of land in hazardous
areas, are simply incongruent with our political culture and the expectations of
most citizens.
One might be tempted to attribute excessive policy demand to state and local
officials and their citizens, who, in the classic economic definition of efficiency,
want as many services as possible for the least amount of taxes or other costs.
Under this conception, state and local governments are simply seeking to offload
responsibility for protecting their citizens to the federal government. On the other
hand, it is equally plausible that excessive policy demand has been created and
stoked by the federal government, in large part because of FEMA’s apparent
competence in the 1990s (Roberts 2006, 57). Much of this demand was created in
the 1990s, when the Clinton administration and James Lee Witt realized that
disasters are prime political opportunities to be generous with relief. Thus, the
number of declared disasters and the amount of relief distributed during the
Clinton administration was the greatest in history. In the 2004 hurricane season,
President Bush and his staff realized that they needed to effectively respond to
overcome yet another Florida debacle on the scale of Hurricane Andrew; they were
largely successful in using generous disaster relief both to help victims and as a
political tool to shore up their standing in a key state in the 2004 elections.
708 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
The promises that the federal government made in the 1990s were carried
forward into the 2000s, even though, beginning in 2003, the executive branch
gutted FEMA to the extent that the agency was unable to perform the way it had
under Witt. Major programs such as hazard mitigation were cut, funds were
stripped from FEMA to pay for sometimes dubious DHS expenditures, and a key
FEMA function—disaster preparedness—was taken from the agency and placed in
the Office of Domestic Preparedness. Hurricane Katrina did induce the reversal of
this trend. But the continued focus on homeland security in the DHS raises
important questions about FEMA’s location within the federal bureaucracy, and
whether and to what extent it should be more directly accountable to the president,
particularly since the DHS secretary, at least in this case, has taken a minimal
interest in natural disasters, focusing on other, far less immediate issues such as
immigration.
Finally, the problems of FEMA and the DHS were exacerbated, particularly at
FEMA, by the administration’s initial use of that agency as a place to put third-rate
party loyalists in positions of responsibility.
Conclusion: Federalism Prospects in Emergency Management
Surprisingly, while September 11 triggered wholesale change in federal-state
relationships in emergency management, Hurricane Katrina, a truly catastrophic
event, has done little to change federal attitudes about the division of
responsibilities. Indeed, the public pronouncements from FEMA and the DHS
suggest that it will continue its pre-2001 mission of response to natural disasters
using a post-2001 model of how the world works.
Perhaps the most obvious evidence of frustration with the system is, as Gerber
(2008) notes, the federal response to implementation problems with the NRP. The
NRP is lengthy, unwieldy, and in some places unclear; in any case, the new plan
was sufficiently unfamiliar to the responders at all levels in Hurricane Katrina to
serve as effective guidance document (it was released in late 2004). Given the
manifest problems with the NRP, and also given the other problems cited above,
including federal creation of excessive policy demand, one would assume that the
federal government might revisit the NRP and its successor, the NRF, in hopes of
both simplifying the plan and making it more usable by all stakeholders in disaster
management, while simultaneously bringing the states and local partners into a
partnership with the federal government rather than a subordinate role.
This is not what the federal government has done. Instead, the federal
government has sought to replace the complex and difficult-to-use NRP with a new
NRF. The shift from a plan to a framework was not accompanied by any change in
federal attitudes toward centralizing emergency management; in particular,
professional groups such as the National Emergency Management Association
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 709
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
(NEMA) claimed that their role in shaping the framework was minimal, and the
focus remains on terrorism. Furthermore, the president of the International
Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) noted that a ‘‘framework is not a
plan,’’ and bemoaned the fact that the new seventy-one page ‘‘framework,’’ which
had the hallmarks of an executive summary, not a real plan, was drafted without
consultation with state and local emergency managers.
4
In short, the homeland
security establishment remains ascendant (Tierney 2005), local input is still
devalued, centralizing tendencies continue, and evidence of any learning from
Hurricane Katrina is tenuous at best.
It is therefore not ‘‘federalism’’ that explains the failure of government initiative
but rather the style of federalism evidenced during Hurricane Katrina. The
tendencies described in this article suggest a two-fold problem: The centralization
of the broader direction of homeland security policy in the federal government
and, at the same time, the creation of plans and organizations that are, if history is
any guide, doomed to fail during times of ‘‘normal’’ natural disasters, in which the
state and local governments still retain considerable responsibility and powers both
under the Constitution and under relevant legislation and regulation. Cutting out
the state and local governments has deprived the federal government of a
considerable body of expertise and has undermined the traditional idea of ‘‘defense
in depth’’ for natural disasters, with state and local governments responding first
and then seeking federal assistance. If the federal government continues to
dominate, state and local capacity could very well be eroded, as it was in Katrina,
where capacity to plan for and respond to a Katrina-sized storm was not built in
large part because of the federal government’s reassignment of resources from
natural disaster preparedness to homeland security ‘‘needs.’’
In the end, we cannot have much faith that another catastrophic disaster like
Hurricane Katrina will greatly influence federal tendencies to centralize the
direction of emergency management policy in Washington. After all, Katrina
should have taught the folly of that approach. Rather, it is likely that only change
in administration in Washington, akin to the change in 1992 that led to FEMA’s
reform, is likely to result in change. As long as emergency management is valued by
the president and the executive branch primarily as a facet of ‘‘homeland security’’
or ‘‘national security,’’ it is unlikely that the federal government will relinquish its
domination of this domain, regardless of this stance’s actual influence on
governmental performance.
Notes
1. This quotation has become part of the legends of emergency management in general and
of Hurricane Andrew in particular, and can be found, among other places, in Bill Adair,
710 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
‘‘10 Years Ago, Her Angry Plea Got Hurricane Aid Moving,’’ St. Petersburg Times,
August 20, 2002. Internet: http://www.sptimes.com/2002/webspecials02/andrew/day3/
story1.shtml, retrieved January 2, 2008. The ‘‘cavalry’’ imagery is now fairly common in
describing demands for assistance: for example, William Waugh notes that in Katrina,
‘‘Whether reasonable or not, there was some expectation that the cavalry would arrive in
helicopters with water, food, tents, and other necessities almost as soon as the storm
passed’’ (Waugh 2006, 11).
2. While this is clearly a rough measure, and the question of blame attribution is better
addressed in Gomez and Wilson (2008), the connection between news coverage and
blame fixing is not as tenuous as it might seem: Increasing news coverage of a disaster or
other problem usually means greater negative attention being paid to the institution or
agency charged with avoiding or responding to the crisis (Baumgartner and Jones 1993).
3. The Seattle Times also has the advantage of being locally owned (not part of a major
chain), so its news product is more likely driven by editorial decisions made in Seattle
about what would be most interesting to its readers in the Pacific Northwest.
4. See the letter on this issue at http://www.iaem.com/pressroom/documents/
IAEMnewsreleaseNRP080907.pdf (last accessed January 25, 2008).
References
Alesch, Daniel J., and William J. Petak. 1986. The politics and economics of earthquake hazard
mitigation. Boulder, Colorado: Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Colorado.
Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. 1993. Agendas and instability in American
politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bennett, W. Lance. 2003. News, the politics of illusion. 5th ed. New York: Longman.
Bennett, W. Lance., and Regina G. Lawrence. 1995. News icons and the mainstreaming of
social change. Journal of Communication 45: 20–39.
Birkland, Thomas A. 1997. After disaster: agenda setting, public policy and focusing events.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
———. 2006. Lessons of disaster. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Birkland, Thomas A., Raymond J. Burby, David. Conrad, Hanna. Cortner, and William
K. Michener. 2003. River Ecology and Flood Hazard Mitigation. Natural Hazards
Review 4 (1): 46–54.
Burby, Raymond J. 1998. Natural hazards and land use: an introduction. In Cooperating
with nature: confronting natural hazards with land-use planning for sustainable communities,
ed. R. J. Burby, Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.
———. 2006. Hurricane Katrina and the paradoxes of government disaster policy: bringing
about wise Governmental decisions for hazardous areas. Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 604 (1): 171–191.
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 711
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Burby, Raymond J., Peter J. May, Philip. Berke, Linda. Dalton, Steven. French, and
Edward. Kaiser. 1996. Making governments plan: state experiments in managing land use.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Burby, Raymond J., Timothy. Beatley, Philip R. Berke, Robert E. Deyle, Steven P. French,
David. Godschalk, Edward J. Kaiser, Jack D. Kartez, Peter J. May, Robert. Olshansky, Robert
G. Paterson, and Rutherford H. Platt. 1999. Unleashing the power of planning to create
disaster-resistant communities. Journal of the American Planning Association 65 (3): 247–258.
Clarke, Lee Ben. 1999. Mission improbable: using fantasy documents to tame disaster. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Conlan, Tim. 2006. From cooperative to opportunistic federalism: reflections on the half-
century anniversary of the commission on intergovernmental relations. Public
Administration Review 66 (5): 663–676.
Cooper, Christopher, and Robert Block. 2006. Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the failure
of homeland security, 1st ed. New York: Times Books.
Derthick, Martha. 2007. Where federalism didn’t fail. Public Administration Review 67 (s1):
36–47.
Gerber, Brian. 2008. Preparing for terrorism and disasters: local government perspectives on
homeland security policymaking. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern
Political Science Association, New Orleans.
Geschwind, Carl-Henry. 2001. California earthquakes: science, risk, and the politics of hazard
mitigation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Godschalk, David., Timothy. Beatley, Philip. Berke, David J. Brower, and Edward J. Kaiser.
2000. Natural hazard mitigation: recasting disaster policy and planning. Washington, DC:
Island Press.
Goggin, Malcolm L., Ann O’M. Bowman, James P. Lester, and Laurence J. O’Toole Jr. 1990.
Implementation theory and practice: toward a third generation. Glenview, IL: Scott
Foresman/Little Brown.
Gomez, Brad T., and Matthew. Wilson. 2008. Political sophistication and attributions of
blame in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 38 (4).
Grodzins, Morton. 1966. In The American system: a new view of government in the United
States, ed. D. J. Elazar, Chicago: Rand McNally.
Haddow, George D., Jane A. Bullock, and Damon P. Coppola. 2007. Introduction to
emergency management. 3rd ed. Boston: Elsevier.
Hanson, Russell L. 2004. Intergovernmental Relations. In Politics in the American States: a
comparative analysis, ed. V. Gray, and R. L. Hanson., Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Homeland Security Council. 2007. National strategy for homeland security. Washington:
National Security Council, Office of the President. Available from: http://www.dhs.gov/
xlibrary/assets/nat_strat_homelandsecurity_2007.pdf (accessed June 12, 2008).
Ingram, Helen., and Dean. Mann. 1980. Policy failure: an issue deserving attention. In Why
policies succeed or fail, ed. H. Ingram, and D. Mann., Beverly Hills, California: Sage.
712 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Kincaid, John. 1990. From cooperative to coercive federalism. Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 509: 139–152.
———. 1996. From dual to coercive federalism in American intergovernmental relations. In
Globalization and decentralization: institutional contexts, policy issues, and intergovernmental
relations in Japan and the United States, ed. J. S. Jun, and D. S. Wright., Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press.
Kingdon, John W. 1995. Agendas, alternatives and public policies. 2nd ed. New York:
HarperCollins.
Krane, Dale A. 2002. The state of American federalism, 2001–2002: resilience in response to
crisis. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 32 (4): 1–28.
Kreps, Gary A. 1990. The federal emergency management system in the United States: past
and present. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 8 (3): 275–300.
Liebschutz, Sarah F. 1985. The national minimum drinking-age law. Publius: The Journal of
Federalism 15 (3): 39–51.
Logan, John R., and Harvey L. Molotch. 1988. Urban fortunes: the political economy of space.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
May, Peter J. 1990. Reconsidering policy design: policies and publics. Journal of Public Policy
11 (2): 187–206.
———. 1995. Can cooperation be mandated? Implementing intergovernmental environ-
mental management in New South Wales and New Zealand. Publius: The Journal of
Federalism 25 (1): 89–113.
May, Peter J., and Thomas A. Birkland. 1994. Earthquake risk reduction: an examination of
local regulatory efforts. Environmental Management 18 (6): 923–939.
May, Peter J., and Walter. Williams. 1986. Disaster policy implementation: managing programs
under shared governance, disaster research in practice. New York: Plenum Press.
McGuire, Michael.. 2006. Intergovernmental management: a view from the bottom. Public
Administration Review 66 (5): 677–679.
Molotch, Harvey., and Marilyn. Lester. 1975. Accidental news: the great oil spill as local
occurrence and national event. American Journal of Sociology 81 (2): 235–261.
Murray, Mark. 2001. Lessons from a master of disaster. National Journal 33 (2): 133–135.
National Research Council, Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences. 2006.
Facing hazards and disasters: understanding human dimensions. Washington, DC: National
Academies Press.
Posner, Paul. 2007. The politics of coercive federalism in the bush era. Publius: The Journal
of Federalism 37 (3): 390–412.
Quarantelli, E. L. 2005. Catastrophes are different from disasters: some implications for crisis
planning and managing drawn from Katrina. Social Science Research Council. Available
from http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Quarantelli (accessed October 21, 2005).
Roberts, Patrick. 2006. FEMA and the prospects for reputation-based autonomy. Studies in
American Political Development 20 (1): 57–87.
Reason for Policy Failure in Hurricane Katrina 713
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
Rossi, Peter H., James D. Wright, and Eleanor. Weber-Burdin. 1982. Natural hazards and
public choice: the state and local politics of hazard mitigation. New York: Academic Press.
Sapat, Alka. 2001. The intergovernmental dimensions of natural disaster and crisis
management in the United States. In Handbook of crisis and emergency management, ed.
A. Farazmand, New York: Marcel Dekker.
Scavo, Carmine., Richard C. Kearney, and Richard J. Kilroy Jr. 2008. Challenges to federalism:
homeland security and disaster response. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 38 (1): 81–110.
Schneider, Saundra. 2008. Who’s to blame: (Mis)Perceptions of the intergovernmental
response to disasters. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 38 (4).
Seed, R. B., R. G. Bea, R. I. Abdelmalak, et al. 2006. Investigation of the performance of the
New Orleans flood protection systems in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005. Berkeley,
California: Independent Levee Investigation Team, University of California, Berkeley.
Available from http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/new_orleans/report/intro&summary.pdf
(accessed January 25, 2008).
Steinberg, Theodore. 2000. Acts of God: The unnatural history of natural disasters in America.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Stone, Deborah A. 1989. Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science
Quarterly 104 (2): 281–300.
Sylves, Richard T. 2007. Federal emergency management comes of age: 1979–2001. In
Emergency management: the American experience, 1900–2005, ed. C. B. Rubin., Arlington,
VA: Public Entity Risk Institute.
Sylves, Richard T., and William R. Cumming. 2004. FEMA’s path to homeland security:
1979–2003. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 1 (2): Article 11.
Available from http://www.bepress.com/jhsem/vol1/iss2/11 (accessed June 1, 2008).
Tierney, Kathleen J. 2005. The red pill. Social Science Research Council. Available from
http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Tierney/(accessed November 12, 2006).
Tierney, Kathleen., Christine. Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski.. 2006. Metaphors matter: disaster
myths, media frames, and their consequences in Hurricane Katrina. Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 604 (1): 57–81.
van Heerden, Ivor. 2007. The failure of the New Orleans levee system following Hurricane
Katrina and the pathway forward. Public Administration Review 67 (s1): 24–35.
van Heerden, Ivor., and Mike. Bryan. 2006. The storm: what went wrong and why during
Hurricane Katrina: the inside story from one Louisiana scientist. New York: Viking.
Waugh, William L. Jr. 2000. Living with hazards; dealing with disasters: an introduction to
emergency management. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
———. 2006. The political costs of failure in the Katrina and Rita disasters. Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 604 (1): 10–25.
Winchester, Simon. 2005. A crack in the edge of the world : America and the Great California
earthquake of 1906, 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins.
714 T. Birkland and S. Waterman
at University of Pennsylvania Library on March 9, 2011publius.oxfordjournals.orgDownloaded from
