Emergency management has gained tremendous interest in the last few years as the United States has had highly publicized and complicated natural disasters to manage. Just like numerous other policies at the federal level, emergency management initiatives are closely aligned with federal policy considerations.
It is with this said that FEMA’s strategic initiatives provide us with a lot of insight as they are a reflection of the current political issues. These policy initiatives will continue to change as the political arena changes and will continue to impact emergency management.
FEMA’s Strategic Initiative Plan
Recently, [link url=”http://edmdigest.com/author/johnepennington/” title=”John Pennington“] published an article on EDM Digest [link url=”https://amuedge.com/pausing-to-consider-femas-strategic-foresight-initiative/” title=”highlighting FEMA’s Strategic Initiative Plan“].
The plan highlights a number of important issues that FEMA is now strongly considering: “The changing role of the individual; climate change; critical infrastructure; evolving terrorist threat and global interdependency” – just to name a few.
These same initiatives are similar to what is posted on the White House website under important policy initiatives considered by the Obama Administration. In fact, just about all of these issues are posted on the White House website as these issue areas are important policy initiatives of the United States.
How These Strategies Came to Light
While FEMA lists a variety of important strategies, the question of how these important strategies came to light becomes an important matter of concern. Are these initiatives goals that the executive branch is working to implement? Are these political issues that are popular in Congress? Are there interest groups pushing these policy issues to the center of the political arena?
Clinton Brass writes, “It could be argued, that goals are inherently political in nature,” – thus, the FEMA strategic initiatives may only be political concerns because of what is happening in the American political arena.
The Nature of How Policies Emerge
Understanding the nature of how policies emerge in the political arena are of strategic interest to emergency managers.
FEMA’s Strategic Initiatives will certainly filter down into the state and local governments as important considerations for emergency management. But it should also be noted that Emergency managers can use this as a lesson to get ahead.
Emergency managers ultimately need to be keenly aware of policy initiatives occurring at the local, state and federal levels of analysis to figure out specifically how they may stay abreast of arising goals surrounding emergency management.
[relink url=”http://edmdigest.com/adaptation/the-professionalization-of-emergency-management/how-will-the-next-president-consider-emergency-management/” url2=”http://edmdigest.com/adaptation/the-professionalization-of-emergency-management/how-will-the-next-president-consider-emergency-management-perspective-2/”]
Comments are closed.