Measured in dollar terms, Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster in American history. Mega-disaster response recovery and mitigation put federalism to an especially diffi cult test because they require speed, effi ciency, decisiveness, and eff ective coordination. Th is essay focuses on the response to and recovery from Katrina in order to probe the implications of mega-disasters for federalism. It understands federalism as being composed of four dimensions: the three levels of government and the civic realm.
It tests key defenses of federalism against civic and government performance during Katrina. It off ers examples of successes and failures involving all four dimensions andprovides specifi c recommendations for improving megadisaster mitigation, response, and recovery while maintaining an appropriate constitutional balance among the three levels of government and between the civilian government and the military.
In this chapter, Landy and Teles take a strong normative stance in favour of decentralization. They echo a point made on economic grounds by Scharpf in Ch. 13, namely, that the role at the federal level should be to allow states to function better as a democracy; this they call ‘the principle of mutuality’. Accordingly, ‘It should be the obligation of each level of government as it participates in joint decision‐making to foster the legitimacy and capacity of the other. Local government contributes to central government by taking the brunt of the burden of citizen‐demands and of providing a coherent and properly constrained voice for citizen grievances. To do so adequately, it must be both responsive and capable. Central government has the responsibility to facilitate and encourage the ability of lower‐level governments to act as sites for deliberation and administration’. This leads Landy and Teles to stress the ways in which European Union powers need to be increased precisely and only to the extent to which this facilitative role is called for. In the end, they can see only classic indirect accountability as the way of enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the EU: ‘The EU needs democratic legitimacy, but that legitimacy should derive from its ability to protect the possibility for democratic government in its Member States, not from the largely fruitless mission of democratizing itself’.
Three recent works provide the point of departure for assessing the performance of the new profession of policy analysis. Both the scope of the enterprise and the standards it adopts for evaluating policy are found to be excessively narrow. A revised framework for policy analysis is proposed whose scope is broadened to encompass the design of policy-making procedures as well as substantive policy outcomes. Such procedures have a vital impact upon how policy problems are defined and how preferences concerning them are formed. The standards for evaluating policy are expanded to include an explicit consideration of citizenship. All policies and policy-making procedures directly or indirectly affect the capacity for self-government. Therefore they must be judged, at least in part, in terms of how they influence the capabilities of citizens to participate in public life and the willingness of citizens to do so.
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