Incentives, Intergovernmental and Intersystem

Intergovernmental Incentives

National governments develop intergovernmental incentive mechanisms to encourage the adherence of different government agencies and lower levels of government to higher-level disaster policy objectives. Incentives are intended to increase the commitment of government and its capacity to implement disaster policies.

Local governments, for example, may be legally and politically responsible for public safety within their jurisdiction, but for a number of reasons, they often neglect emergency management. The effectiveness of emergency response depends on the quality of planning before a disaster occurs, but local governments are often unwilling to develop plans and allocate resources to emergency management because of the lack of citizen concern about hazards. In addition, it is hard to demonstrate the benefits of emergency management, so local governments prefer to prioritize more visible investments such as public infrastructure and education. Also, local governments, particularly in developing countries, lack the financial, administrative, and human resource capacity to prepare for, mitigate, and respond to disasters.

National disaster management systems often started out as civil defense agencies, characterized by their top-down, militaristic, command-and-control approach to dealing with disasters. Intergovernmental incentives were not needed, as the line of authority was clear. Today, most countries have complex civil protection systems with emergency management responsibilities shared between different levels of government.

In all but the most decentralized and the most highly centralized governance systems, it is usual for a national government (or the federal government in the case of federal systems) to define disaster policy and for lower levels of government to help implement it, usually with some participation from the private sector and civil society organizations. The extent to which local [Page 336]government can define its own disaster policies varies widely between countries. Among the most decentralized emergency management systems are Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Costa Rica, where municipalities actively engage in the identification of disaster risk and in the development of land-use plans and regulations.

The U.S. federal government, through NOAA, launched a nationwide flood safety public awareness campaign in 2003

Broadly, there are two types of intergovernmental incentive systems for emergency management: coercive and collaborative. With coercive mandates, higher levels of government decide on policy and regulatory standards. Local governments are responsible for implementation and compliance. Coercive mandates pay some attention to building the capacity of local governments to comply, but this is secondary to putting in place monitoring systems for compliance and invoking penalties for non-compliance. With more cooperative intergovernmental mandates, lower-level governments develop and apply policies and regulations that are consistent with higher-level goals. Cooperative incentives include financial support and technical assistance, used to enhance the commitment of local governments and other decentralized government agencies to higher-level policy goals and to increase their capacity to act.

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