Thread by @m_older

All of this thread.
When I shifted from working on disasters for international NGOs to studying how governments do disasters, I was struck by shift in terminology: NGOs (mostly) do humanitarian work or disaster relief/aid. Governments do emergency management.

https://twitter.com/surlybassey/status/1483882704382926850

INGOs [aim to] follow the humanitarian imperative: those affected are human and need help, ergo we should help them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitar…

"Emergency management", on the other hand, implies not helping people or providing relief to them but *managing* the *emergency*: dealing with the crisis until it can be navigated back to the status quo. It's about getting through it, preventing more upheaval and disruption.

Now, let me be clear: I've talked to a lot of emergency managers, mainly in FEMA and in Japan's Disaster Mitigation offices for my dissertation but also in other countries, and many of them are extremely dedicated and got into the job to help people. Likewise,

I worked in NGOs for years and met lots of NGO workers who were jerks and some who were definitely not in the job for humanitarian reasons and sometimes those circles overlapped. And vice versa of course: govt jerks and NGO humanitarians.

Also, there's a difference in standing. NGOs have no legal right to work in sovereign nations. They're not elected or appointed. They NEED an imperative to justify their interference. They also need to define what they're doing and why to get permission from suspicious govts.

Governments, otoh...you would think governments *would* have both the right and the responsibility to care for their people during disasters/emergencies. But even the idea of a Responsibility to Protect is fairly recent & still largely conceptual en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsib…

The history of disaster response in the United States is far more about restoring assets to those lucky enough to have had them than about helping people. Disaster studies shows, over and over, authorities worrying about disasters leading to shifts that upset their control.

The focus has become continuity, normalcy, protecting assets and "the economy" (meaning, the economic interests of big businesses, lobbyists, the rich), maintaining the status quo. It's ironic in some ways, because if they're worried about legitimacy, you would think they might

look at how non-governmental actors - usually, rebel movements - often gain legitimacy and popular support by supporting their constituents with social programs. But despite our claims about living in a democracy and even exporting democracy,

despite its theoretical wealth and stability, policy in the US is driven by money and justified by fears of "unrest" and "economic disruption". And thus also disaster policy. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

And disaster policy typically reflects and blurs into "normal" policy areas. If govt agencies are unnecessarily stringent and cruel about housing people after a disaster, it's because they've learned to be that way from non-disaster housing policy and guidance. etc.

It's stupid. because mostly, policies that are humanitarian - that help people in need - are also solidly good sense for ✨the economy✨ in any generalized sense of the term. but somehow we've been convinced that being kind or helpful is "bad business sense". Total COMEMIERDERÍA

According to economic studies, immigration, including that of refugees and asylum seekers, is GOOD for the receiving country, as well as being both legally and morally the right thing to do. But comemierdas on racism-coded rants about jobs have convinced people the opposite.

Forgiving student debt? Great for the economy. Where is the downside? but noooooo that would be, I don't know, soft? not "serious" where serious means protecting the interests of rich people? Comemierdería, right there.

And so with "emergency management". I talked to people in Mississippi who had figured out how to use the Katrina recovery money to build casinos -an extractive industry that they've sold as a good basis for their "economy"-but didn't want to give people $ to rebuild homes if they

didn't have the right insurance, because "moral hazard"; didn't bother to figure out how to help people who rented rather than owned at all. It all fits in to an economic -not even theory, but idea, let's say- that's been pretty thoroughly disproved. And yet people still buy it.

Disaster recovery in the US has all these rules about building things back to the dollar value of what was lost, instead of thinking about how to build something better, more resistant to future disasters, more helpful to communities. It's an obsessive fear of "over"spending or

being "cheated", when the real concern should be not doing enough, causing more long-term costs because of this short term skinflintery. It's like the ridiculous efforts to check for drug use among people on welfare, that cost far far more than they save, aclu.org/other/drug-tes…

like all these extreme lengths to prevent so-called voter fraud when we should be concentrating on getting more people to vote, making it easier to vote, because apathy is a far far larger problem in our democracy than voter fraud.

We should be governing for the vulnerable with generosity and abundance, both during disasters and not -which would also lessen the impacts of disasters when they happen. Instead it's governing for the wealthy with constraint and cruelty towards everyone else, undermining systems

into fragility and then shocked faces and tutting about spending when they break down. There is no economic or sound public policy basis for any of this. In a really democratic government with decent information ecosystems it wouldn't stand.