Allan McConnell

Preparing for Critical Infrastructure Breakdowns: The Limits of Crisis Management and the Need for Resilience

Modern societies are widely considered to harbour an increased propensity for breakdowns of their critical infrastructure (CI) systems. While such breakdowns have proven rather rare, Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of such breakdowns. This article explores how public authorities can effectively prepare to cope with these rare events. Drawing from the literature on crisis and disaster management, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of traditional approaches to crisis preparation and crisis response. We argue that the established ways of organising for critical decision-making will not suffice in the case of a catastrophic breakdown. In the immediate aftermath of such a breakdown, an effective response will depend on the adaptive behaviour of citizens, front-line workers and middle managers. In this article, we formulate a set of strategies that enhance societal resilience and identify the strong barriers to their implementation.

Crisis exploitation: political and policy impacts of framing contests

When societies are confronted with major, disruptive emergencies, the fate of politicians and public policies hangs in the balance. Both government actors and their critics will try to escape blame for their occurrence, consolidate/strengthen their political capital, and advance/defend the policies they stand for. Crises thus generate framing contests to interpret events, their causes, and the responsibilities and lessons involved in ways that suit their political purposes and visions of future policy directions. This article dissects these processes and articulates foundations for a theory of crisis exploitation. Drawing on 15 cases of crisis-induced framing contests, we identify potentially crucial factors that may explain both the political (effects on incumbent office-holders/institutions) and policy (effects on programs) impacts of crises.

Mission Impossible? Planning and Preparing for Crisis

Crisis management logic suggests that planning and preparing for crisis should be a vital part of institutional and policy toolkits. This paper explores the difficulties in translating this ideal into practice. It focuses on four key difficulties. First, crises and disasters are low probability events but they place large demands on resources and have to compete against front-line service provision. Second, contingency planning requires ordering and coherence of possible threats, yet crisis is not amenable to being packaged in such a predictable way. Third, planning for crisis requires integration and synergy across institutional networks, yet the modern world is characterised by fragmentation across public, private and voluntary sectors. Fourth, robust planning requires active preparation through training and exercises, but such costly activities often produced a level of symbolic readiness which does not reflect operational realities. Finally the paper reflects on whether crisis preparedness is a ‘mission impossible’, even in the post-9/11 period when contingency planning seems to be an issue of high political salience.

Policy Success, Policy Failure and Grey Areas In-Between

Policy protagonists are keen to claim that policy is successful while opponents are more likely to frame policies as failures. The reality is that policy outcomes are often somewhere in between these extremes. An added difficulty is that policy has multiple dimensions, often succeeding in some respects but not in others, according to facts and their interpretation. This paper sets out a framework designed to capture the bundles of outcomes that indicate how successful or unsuccessful a policy has been. It reviews existing literature on policy evaluation and improvement, public value, good practice, political strategy and policy failure and success in order to identify what can be built on and gaps that need to be filled. It conceives policy as having three realms: processes, programs and politics. Policies may succeed and/or fail in each of these and along a spectrum of success, resilient success, conflicted success, precarious success and failure. It concludes by examining contradictions between different forms of success, including what is known colloquially as good politics but bad policy.

Raman spectra of niobium oxides

Abstract Raman spectra of various types of niobium oxides have been studied along with their i.r. spectra and the spectra interpreted in the light of the structures of the oxides. Besides discussing LO-TO splitting in these oxides, bands characteristic of edge-shared and corner-shared NbO6, octahedra have been assigned. Tetrahedral modes of NbO4, PO4, and VO4 units present in some of the oxides have been assigned to distinct bands in the spectra indicating negligible coupling between the tetrahedra and NbO6 octahedra. The spectra of PNb9O25 and analogues suggest that they belong to I4/m space group rather than IZ 4 - group.

Success? Failure? Something in-between? A framework for evaluating crisis management

Abstract Crisis management evaluators and commentators, routinely attach labels of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ to crisis management initiatives. Yet there is a near absence of detailed criteria against which outcomes can be assessed. This article goes some way to redressing this paucity of reflection. The article presents an innovative framework to help analysts approach and evaluate the issue of what constitutes success (and failure) in crisis management initiatives, including complex policy/political outcomes between these extremes. In recognition of the realpolitik of crisis responses, it deals also with successes (and failures) in crisis management processes, decisions and politics.

What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze

The discipline of public policy has struggled to come to terms with how we may conceive of ‘policy failure’. It tends to assume either that failure is self-evident or that it can be assessed by means of examining the gap between government goals and outcomes. Often, there are multiple caveats that seem too difficult to address – particularly the role of perceptions, which in turn are often dependent on whether or not the policy is supported. This ground-breaking article builds on and refines existing literature. It turns on its head the multiple methodological challenges surrounding what constitutes policy failure (such as competing goals and variance over time) and suggests that such seemingly impenetrable challenges actually help illuminate our understanding. In doing so, it argues that once we conceive of studying policy failure as ‘art and craft’, we are better placed to navigate the messy realpolitik of types and degrees of failure, as well as ambiguities and tensions between them. The groundwork for doing so is based on a working definition of failure, namely that a policy fails, even if it is successful in some minimal respects, if it does not fundamentally achieve the goals that proponents set out to achieve, and opposition is great and/or support is virtually non-existent.

Weaving the Fabric of Public Policies: Comparing and Integrating Contemporary Frameworks for the Study of Policy Processes

Abstract For close to three decades multiple frameworks of policy-making have served as competitive characterizations of policy processes. All claim to provide accounts that capture diverse factors such as changing governance norms, actors and ideas which drive programme interventions and policy outputs. Paradoxically, the resilience of different models such as the policy cycle framework and the multiple streams framework has been accompanied by numerous critiques that they are “incomplete” and even divorced from the real world. This article presents an effort to synthesize and reconcile these frameworks in which the appeal and strengths of each can be retained while going some way to overcoming their weaknesses and limitations. It does so through the introduction of an integrative metaphor for policy-making – what Wayne Parsons termed “weaving” – which can be applied to all stages of public policy, and is flexible enough to cope with issues such as power, complexity and critical junctures while reconciling different groupings and sets of actors highlighted as significant policy players in earlier models. It elaborates this framework before applying it by way of illustration to one of the most controversial policy initiatives in modern British history: the 1989–93 poll tax. The article and case study highlight the potential for its general application in policy studies.

A public policy approach to understanding the nature and causes of foreign policy failure

ABSTRACT All governments are vulnerable to policy failure but our understanding of the nature and causes of policy failure is highly underdeveloped. This contribution, written from a public policy perspective, sets out a framework for understanding these issues as applied to foreign policy. In doing so, it seeks a cross-disciplinary fertilization of thinking that uses the messy and contested reality of policy failure as fundamentally a key – rather than a barrier – to advancing our understanding of a phenomenon referred to variously as policy fiascos, policy disasters, policy blunders and policy failures.

The vibrational properties of some gold(III)-halide complexes

Raman and i.r. spectra of a range of gold complexes of the form LAuX3 (L = C6H5)3P, (C2H5)3P, pyridine, lutidene and α-picoline; X = Cl− or Br−) are reported and interpreted on the basis of a C2ν symmetry for the molecules. The effects of changes in the electronic structure appear to have a larger influence on the vibrational spectrum than steric or mass effects. The splitting of ν6(D4h) resulting from substitution by L is much larger in the bromide series than in the chloride series and is probably due to π bonding in the complexes. ν1 and ν2 energy changes reflect both a change in bonding and in a smaller mass and steric influence. The compounds Py2AuX3 appear to be trans isomers.