Academic knowledge and its application in emergency management practice

Relevance of Academic Knowledge to Emergency Management Practice

There is continued escalation of human initiated and technological disasters due the high-risk locations become inhabited. The vulnerability of the world to extreme events is increasing more and more. The community of disaster research has been continually investigating systematically the causes of disasters and its consequences for more than five decades and this is set to make important contributions towards the mitigation of pain and loss of life caused by the catastrophic events. This has subsequently added important information that is useful to the emergency managers. The scholars work in their study of hazards and disasters is highly salient currently despite the low prominence historically of research in hazards in most disciplines of social sciences. The relevance of academic knowledge to the practice of emergency management is more evident with the emerging new role of emergency managers (Woodbury, 2005, p.83). This knowledge is important in better understanding of the origins of the disasters, dealing with uncertainties by elimination of ignorance and creating a culture of preparedness. This paper will analyze the relevance of the academic knowledge in the practice of the emergency management and considering how the evolved role of emergency management needs this knowledge for capacity building. The importance of academic knowledge in professionalization of the practice will also be considered. The paper will also describe how the impact of disaster education is useful to the emergency managers and in particular the various researches in this regards will be analyzed where disaster education has helped cultures to increase preparedness. Improved adaptive response due to the disaster education will also be described. The evolving disasters will also be evaluated and how the need for academic knowledge in keeping pace with the emerging threats will be considered.

Dealing with disasters needs academic knowledge

Established universities disciplines provide the necessary knowledge to deal with incrementing and powerful disasters by protecting people and property. The idea of application of sociology theory to the studies of disaster were first taught by the F.H. Giddings a sociologist from Columbia University after performing the initial study on disaster focusing on society-nature interface with his first student being Henry Samuel Prince. This does not apply on to sociology but also to political science, psychology, geography, geology and genetics. The sum of the components of the required knowledge should be equitable to the complete disaster or hazard manager. The question as to whether the emergency manager can be able to know enough regarding what is at stake arises (Phillips, 2005, p.133). A university-level effort is required by the hazard and disaster study and understanding. Nature to society relationship understanding and vice-versa needs significant knowledge in the science and arts. This interdisciplinary approach is usually provided by the academic institutions. It is therefore reasonable for the accent of the academic institutions that it is indeed a noble effort in edifying the students on the knowledge that will be useful in life and property protection from the forces of man and nature. More and more emergency managers are required currently because of the incremented threats and risks from technological causes therefore information and discovery in a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach is essential (Wilson, 1999, p.219).

The previous ways whereby it was not common to find the emergency managers who are university educated are coming to an end. There has been an experiential emergency manager's knowledge base but its incessantly being based on education. This is an evolution necessary to tackle the changing disasters which needs to be better understood. Because the focus is now on development of communities which are disaster resistant which will be a catalyst for safer nations, an emergency management approach which is risk-based is taken by the new emergency management generation. This need is also driven by the reduction of social vulnerability which is life-long learners, plan strategically together with jurisdictional stakeholders, being part of professional associations with even professional library and having a wide working contracts range so as to accomplish inter- and multi- interdisciplinary needs of the job. Students are required to undertake courses which will enhance their academic knowledge usually from several disciplines which characterizes the multidisciplinary approach in education. For instance the disaster studies consist of different knowledge from psychology to sociology, to geology, to geography. Therefore the creation of an academic discipline which emphasizes on life and property protection and reducing the suffering of humans caused by nature's forces is perceived as noble (Smithson, 1990, p.208).

Impact of education on preparedness and adaptive response

Emergency practitioners and researchers use the preparedness as a concept which refers to several activities which indirectly or directly will reduce the loss of property and life in the event of a disaster. For instance individuals might engage in it by having a family emergency plan or putting in place route used for evacuation are some of the planning activities examples. Varying levels of preparedness has been revealed by research which the household or the individuals have engaged in planning activities during the pre-disaster period. For instance, a family disaster plan had been in 81% of the studied sample and almost all the individuals responded in accordance with the plan during the time Kalamazoo, Michigan was stuck by a tornado. Again in the volcano of Mt. St. Helens, though the slightly less values were found but it was still substantial household planning levels with a percentage of individuals about 48.8 and 69.9% in the sample of two communities which showed planning activity which was of high degree. By contrast few people were found prior to the earthquake in California in 1971 to have any preparation while a paltry three percent had established a disaster plan for the family in the floods of 1965 in Colorado.

There is distinction of the planning activities from the adaptive response which involves behaviors that are protective in nature engaged by households or individuals because of knowledge of an impending disaster. Therefore the population which has obtained this information acts by for instance filling their cars with gas, removing or loose items in the yards, ensuring the flashlights are working and storing of food and water. These activities of response are associated to the planning activities and an appropriate response of activities results from higher preparedness levels. The individual's preparedness and prior planning is the one factor that was found to be related to favorable response consistently. Both response and planning activities are in fact aimed at mitigating the loss of property and life. The fact that activities of adaptive response take place after the threat has occurred while planning activities happen considerably prior to the threat of the disaster is a crucial conceptual importance. Therefore long-term and incessant activities are implied in the planning while adaptive response refers to immediate reaction to the threat. Therefore the impact of education can be analyzed on the two factors independently.

Impact of Disaster education

Disaster education has been observed to affect the preparedness behavior positively. This subject has had limited literature covering it because there has been rare investigation of education leading to adaptive response except for research on communication. A positive association between disaster experience and adaptive response has been found by numerous studies. The adaptive response is itself considered a type of education. The literature on disaster subcultures importance has been extended in the appropriate preparedness behavior facilitation. In these communities the individual's part increased level of knowledge is the significant component of subcultures of disaster which has been presumed to aid in the preparedness facilitation. Important questions have been raised in addressing the present study. Previous experience of disasters particularly of repeated nature such as those experienced in the disaster subcultures acts as a teacher though of bad experience. Probably this is the best school but questions are raised on whether the same lessons can be learned through a less costly way such as participation in educational programs dealing with disasters. Greater knowledge regarding the threat should be provided to the participants by disaster education and the relevant action that can be undertaken to protect them. Adaptive behavior which is appropriate should then result from this knowledge. The impact of education disaster situations is not yet well-known with regards to the adaptive behavior (Mileti, 1999, p.179).

There has been some evidence to indicate that incremented awareness and knowledge of the threat can be caused by educational material exposure. The information of one's belief and knowledge using educational materials has been question by various researchers. For instance, in the Kansas flood plain zones there was no effect on the awareness of the citizens with the distribution of plain maps of the flood plain. Again following an educational program, no significant differences in knowledge with regards to the tsunami and those who had received the information from the education program only one-third attributed them as the information source. Some respondents didn't regard information which was disseminated through schools and brochures and other formal channels. Also the idea that appropriate behavior can be assumed to be attribute from the knowledge gotten through education program of disaster even if they were successful. The disparity between manifestation of behavior and cognitive has long been recognized by the social scientist that is people do not always do what they say. There has also been found little behavior and environmental attitudes relationship. Therefore there can be no assumption that people will use their knowledge as the basis of their action even if they know what they should do during a disaster. Some evidence however does suggest that they may be able to act with reference to their knowledge. There has been presented findings from exhaustive review which shows that people will have a better degree of preparedness whenever they are more informed. Results from Japan and United States shows that the respondents found the hurricane information kits to be more useful in the information they provided. Other respondents have been found to have a high activity of preparedness for those individuals who brochures about the risks of flooding compared to who did not receive. They also displayed a greater degree of flood awareness (Neal, 1993, p.8).

The other question raised on this regard is the accumulation of knowledge on one agent of disaster will be transferred to other types of agents. Some criticism in this regard are that the knowledge resulting from the experience in one disaster type can even lead to thwarting of response if the person is faced with a disaster type which is different from their experience. This can be summarized by the consideration that experience obtained from a particular program in one location may not be necessarily useful in the protective schemes design of different locations or the rest of the country.

New emergency managers

Emergency managers are first trained in preparation for developing roles as participants in consensus building efforts in their community and also to enable them work on a common agenda with community institutions and its leaders. The second stage involves introducing relevant public and private stakeholders into the emergency management planning process as they are important in achieving sustainable development. The emergency managers are brought in to work with community leaders and policy makers, in community planning and development activities, as stakeholders. The final step, which ensures success of new emergency management as a part of sustainable development, involves the linking of the community's public policies to the concept of sustainability (Wilson, 1999 p.218). Emergency management policies as well as social, economic and political policies, which are necessary for the community's prosperity, have to be integrated into the process of community planning. Emergency management should be connected to other areas of community life so as to promote sustainability and thus making it a success.

Emergency management needs to be more than reactive and disaster specific, as was the traditional tendency, and go beyond efficient disaster response and operations of recovery. This means that emergency managers have to anticipate and take charge of situations presented by emphasizing on disaster management, meaning that they have to be involved in partnerships that all community leaders are involved in, dealing with sustainable development. There is a lot more than technical skill that is required in order to make a convincing case to community leaders, establish links with other community leaders and institutions, and establish a network of support groups and stakeholders because of their importance in the transformation. The emergency manager needs to be trained and educated with main focus being on skills relevant for more strategic emergency management (Britton, 1999, p24).

All emergency managers require training at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Advanced training in leadership, organizational behavior, strategic planning, public policy and analytical methods are associated with public policy are needed more than ever. A professional is needed to tackle the links between emergency management and building of sustainable communities and the need to emphasize mitigation. The education of the emergency manager has to take on a new priority and ensure it represents a wide range of competencies in order to enable the emergency manager tackle the tasks of networking and building relationships with community decision makers, develop the ability to recognize opportunities for successful disaster management in the ultimate task of sustainable development.

Finally, there should be a basic foundation in emergency management included in the professional training of all public management professionals. Training reflecting on the links between hazard mitigation, community planning and sustainable development should be provided in graduate and undergraduate programs. This means that emergency management will become a component to the professional education of public administrators without necessarily training them as emergency managers. The training focuses on the value of mitigating hazards in a way that is sustainable as a critical component in community planning and development and broadens understanding with regards to importance of assessing potential hazards and mitigations as opposed to their impact in order to make decisions that impact the community's physical, social and economic well being (Britton, 1999, p29).

Importance of academic knowledge in professionalism of emergency management

The first primary characteristic in professions is monopoly, which gives one the ability to perform specific occupational tasks. Autonomy, the second characteristic, is self-regulation of the performance of said tasks. Professionals have the general attributes of having exclusive power to train new members and allowing them to practice the said occupation according to its own standards without excessive outside interference and the power to judge its own members' performance. In order to ensure monopoly and autonomy, there is need for willful organizational efforts among an occupational group that are essential for professionalization. An occupation is defined as having achieved professional status by achieving monopoly and autonomy. Emergency management as a trade has achieved enough maturity to advance towards being a profession as it is yet to be one. By pursuing autonomy and monopoly, the principle characteristics of a profession, emergency management can achieve professionalization. Two basic processes, namely accreditation and certification (individual credentialing through education or training or both), are responsible for formal advancement towards a profession of emergency management (Oyola-Yemaiel & Wilson 2005, p.80).

Mechanisms currently being employed to accomplish professional status are accreditation and certification. These two processes are independent of each other as they apply to different levels of analysis and have a different nature of manifestation. They act as axes around which the organization of the emergency management field, towards a profession. These are not the only venues that can be employed in advancing a field towards becoming a profession.

Professionalization strategy: Accreditation

This involves setting standards that govern individual performance and govern advancement within profession help establish professions control and monitor their professional standing. An occupation can be made more efficient and accountable to the public through the principle of professionalism. In order to achieve acceptable behavior and prevent performance that is not acceptable, standards have to be set in order to impose control over the trade. There are claims that all professions should have public statement stating their qualified member's competencies and what the public should expect from them. The ability of a profession to identify with a set of standards enhances its credibility. Accreditation is a process by which standards for performance are set. Generally, it's a process through which an organization approves an institution or program as having met certain accepted, pre-determined criteria that serves as a test of the level of quality of service provided (Houle 1980, p.68). It's therefore a rigorous, comprehensive process of evaluation that assesses an institution or program against set standards. To ensure standards are maintained and members of the institution or program are drawn to a direct consideration of the ends and means of the work done, there is need for periodic re-accreditation. It also allows labor trade organizations set regulatory principles from within the profession. This ensures that criteria governing decisions and actions of practitioners are universally acceptable.

The delineated standards determine the administration and conduct of all aspects of the practice in the field with disregard for the location. This means that professional status is based on standards that are nationally applicable. Workplace accreditation through audits of practices and accomplishments aims at ensuring quality of performance (Houle, 1980, p.93). To ensure that accredited professional agencies are held accountable for their actions (what they do or results of what is done), they have to provide evidence of work performed to the highest proficiency levels. Accreditation can be a process by which it evaluates the labor trade agency, in depth, on the basis of the standards, while as an outcome; it's the ultimate step towards professionalization. On evaluation, an agency makes changes needed to meet standards and survives scrutiny and can thus be perceived by its peers as a professional organization. It's for this reason that accreditation is viewed as a culmination of a growing professionalism, by many. When referring to accreditation of emergency management; it refers to its programs and jurisdiction. It refers to its organizational tasks and set standards of performance of its functions at a minimal level of proficiency (Oyola-Yemaiel & Wilson 2005, p.79). Accreditation as a concept is based on the ideal of all states and localities complying with minimum performance standards in all phases of emergency management.

Accreditation for emergency management programs

The council of State Government in partnership with FEMA/DHS, generates accreditation for emergency management programs making compliance, as a concept, anchor. Accreditation provides assurance on the federal level of an accredited state, country or city being ready, can respond to, has potential to recover from and is militating against impact of natural and technological hazards. Accreditation means creating higher standards of performance, moving towards practices requiring more esoteric knowledge and a labor force that is highly skilled. Although operating at macro level effects of accreditation reach individual practitioners required to perform to the organizations' set standards (Neal, 2000, p.419).

Professionalization Strategy: Certification

The credentialing of the individual emergency managers, also known as individual practitioners in the field is the other fundamental process towards achieving professionalization of emergency management. To ensure professionalization of emergency management, emergency managers are required to be integrators of the theoretical and practical knowledge of the field. Practitioners display achievement of a level of expertise, thus legitimizing their actions, which are an indication of emergency management achieving professionalization. By achieving legitimization at societal level, emergency management becomes exclusive and keeps others from performing similar activities (Larson, 1978, p.71). This is done by proving to the public and the community decision makers that their intellectual and practical skills, the specific tasks require somebody who has been able to prove their ability. Certification thus involves various forms training available at home, as well as credentialing from higher institutions of education

Some important set of tools used to upgrade the theoretical conceptualization of the occupation include education and training (Oyola-Yemaiel & Wilson 2005, p.81). Exclusive instruction ensures that an academic and theoretical-based body of knowledge remains inaccessible to the rest of society. All certified practitioners would show to have mastered a common set of competencies through development of standards of certification. Education and training ensures individual members of an occupation assert their domain and become autonomous self-regulating owners of their trade. Originally devised for purpose of establishing capabilities of certification is applied nowadays to determine the degree of an individual's competencies throughout their entire career and not at the entry level alone. Certification enables synchronization of the individual practitioner's goals and idiosyncrasies to encourage the status of the group and mobility of the society. This helps the individual emergency manager acquire respectability from the society at large and beyond it. This makes the collective efforts of increasing social status by the occupation members partly individualistic. Prestige is attached to professional roles and their occupants despite the collective nature of the goal and means of achieving it. This is through upgrading of an occupation, in an attempt to control the members that it involves in the process of achieving the desired goal (Larson, 1978, p271). When political pressures are applied to control policies that are responsible for the advance of the above practice, recognition and respectability magnify. This means that the ability to lobby for legislated monopoly requires respectability that is achieved through a recognized capacity to handle the trade. It applies to education and training applied to performance standards. The strength of the voice of the emergency management community determines its recognition and how its expertise is legitimized. The implications of certifying an individual manager bears upon the parent organizations and institutions in spite of the certification applying to individual emergency manager. Credentialing through certifications upgrades the institution's ranking enabling it to monopolize and self-regulate emergency management trade.

Conclusion

Effective emergency management is based on knowledge and expertise is useful in its augmentation through experience and skills. However the conventional practices of emergency management have for decades put the priority on training which skill is based. The emergency managers need to be familiar with operations of emergency response, applications of disaster rules, executive administration and effective techniques of communication as some of important basic knowledge (Oyola-Yemaiel & Wilson, 2002, p.73). The need for intense education is important in the hazards backgrounds that they face, the reactions of human to these threats and the political and analytical tools for comprehensive institution of mitigation and prevention policies are necessary for the implementation of actions and policies efficiently that will mitigate the disasters impacts.