Austin and Travis County, Texas, ran one response to Winter Storm Uri and recorded two different results. Medical coordination worked, and the after-action review names part of the reason. "This coordination was successful in part due to previous working relationships built during the ongoing response to COVID-19" (p. 46). Three pages earlier, the same report records a failure to establish a common operating picture at shelter operations (p. 43). One jurisdiction, one storm, one document, two outcomes. The report's own explanation for the one that worked is a relationship that existed before the storm.
Designation and participation are two separate processes, and the second is what gets tested during a crisis. This brief asks what evidence exists demonstrating this, and includes works from doctrine, after-action reports, exercises, academic analysis, and practitioner testimony, and where that record is silent, the brief says so.
A population can be named in every resilience strategy ever written, and still enter a disaster or a war without the buy-in, the agency, the decision space, or the practical capacity to act as an organized participant. In other words, organized population capacity and capability. Whole-of-society doctrine now names government, business, civil society, communities, and individuals as central to preparedness for both disasters and war. While recognition is progress and it should not be argued away, unfortunately it is not evidence that participation has been organized. For every organization, department, or community a plan names, what has been built?
What we're reviewing in this issue
How NATO, the EU, the United States, Sweden, and Finland name government, business, communities, and citizens in their resilience doctrine, in their own words, and why that recognition is not yet evidence of organized participation.
The six conditions that stand between a published strategy and performance in a crisis, designation, awareness, commitment, connection, agency, and practice, and where each one actually gets built.
Seven observable conditions, answerable from records your organization already holds, that measure participation rather than presence, with an audit you can run against your own plan.
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