The security, safety, and public health threat posed by multiple simultaneous disasters has emerged as a major challenge for American institutions in recent years. The growing frequency and severity of disasters, a consequence in part of rapidly occurring climate change, ensures that concurrent disasters will pose an ongoing challenge to governments at the local, state, and national level.

In this project, we studied the role of non-state service providers -including non-profit organizations, religious groups, and businesses- in responding to concurrent and overlapping disasters. We considered an array of hypotheses about how non-state entities supplement state capacity during and after disasters, how these entities target their services, how they evaluate their efforts, how they coordinate with government, and how their responses to an emergent disaster might be shaped by fiscal and resource constraints stemming from another ongoing crisis. We focused our research efforts on case studies of the simultaneous COVID/Winter Storm crises in Texas, the confluence of the Delta wave of COVID and Hurricane Ida in Louisiana, and the sequence of persistent drought and severe storms in California. Examining these cases allowed us to gain traction on key issues in security and public health through an analysis of concurrent crises across jurisdictions and governing environments with differing degrees of state capacity and non-state entity resources.

In the process of this research, we completed surveys of 65 emergency management and 32 public health offices in Texas as well as surveys of 527 non-profit organizations in Texas, Louisiana, and California. We also conducted on-the-ground or virtual interviews with 65 non-profits and government agencies within these three disaster-impacted areas. This research was facilitated by graduate students who received mentorship in research methods and analysis.

Our analysis of these surveys and interviews makes clear the complex nature of the threat that concurrent crises represent to the American disaster state. We found highly divergent impacts from earlier or ongoing disasters, with some non-profit groups reporting that an ongoing crisis (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) had stretched their resources beyond the breaking point. Other groups, meanwhile, reported that the earlier or ongoing crisis had led them to adapt in ways that made them more prepared for a simultaneous emergent threat. In the realm of accountability to the communities that non-profit groups serve, we found that closer ties to government led organizations to engage in higher levels of evaluation of their services. For example, those that received government funding were more likely to report outcomes publicly, audit programs and services, and solicit feedback from the communities they serve. Importantly, we also found that non-profit groups tended to target their services during disasters on the basis of convenience, proximity, and pre-existing ties rather than direct services based upon standardized criteria related to need.

Last Modified: 10/04/2023
Modified by: Herschel F Thomas