Measuring What Matters in Disaster Management
Services: Research & Evaluation · Risk Assessment · Recovery & Resilience
THE CHALLENGE
My interest in measurement began at Concern Worldwide, where I documented more than a decade of disaster risk reduction programming. Across emergency management, public health, and community resilience, practitioners often rely on proxy measures, such as whether doctrine is followed or boxes are checked, instead of assessing whether systems and communities are better prepared. Without valid, reliable, and useful metrics, it is hard to improve performance, allocate resources, or demonstrate impact.
THE APPROACH
- Development and testing of incident management performance metrics with 30+ public health agencies during real emergencies, as Co-Principal Investigator on a CDC-funded project
- Interviews and literature review to build a framework of core incident management functions
- Design of a stakeholder mapping model for the Department of Homeland Security, as Principal Investigator
- Development of a systems-centric framework for assessing the resilience of local systems, with GOAL
- Practitioner tools for participatory risk analysis and community resilience measurement, tested across multiple contexts
THE OUTCOME
A suite of measurement tools spanning incident management, community resilience, and local systems resilience, including the Incident Management Measurement Toolkit and peer-reviewed frameworks used by practitioners.
Further Reading
The Incident Management Measurement Toolkit RAND Corporation
Five Key Domains of Incident Management Domestic Preparedness
Resilience for Systems (R4S): A New Approach for Assessing the Resilience of Local Systems GOAL Global
Practitioner approaches to measuring community resilience: The analysis of the resilience of communities to disasters toolkit International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Participatory risk network analysis: A tool for disaster reduction practitioners International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction