The Chicago Fire of 1871: a bottom-up approach to disaster relief

Abstract

Can bottom-up relief efforts lead to recovery after disasters? Conventional wisdom and contemporary public policy suggest that major crises require centralized authority to provide disaster relief goods. Using a novel set of comprehensive donation and expenditure data collected from archival records, this paper examines a bottom-up relief effort following one of the most devastating natural disasters of the nineteenth century: the Chicago Fire of 1871. Findings show that while there was no central government relief agency present, individuals, businesses, corporate entities and municipal governments were able to finance the relief effort though donations. The Chicago Relief and Aid Society, a voluntary association of agents with a stake in relief outcomes, leveraged organizational assets and constitutional rules to administer aid. JEL Codes: D64, D71, H41, H84

The Ostroms and the contestable nature of goods: beyond taxonomies and toward institutional polycentricity

“…Additionally, co-production provides a richer explanation as to why, in uncertain times such as those during post-disaster scenarios, informal, bottom-up institutions often outperform formal markets or government institutions in the provision of goods and services (Chamlee-Wright and Storr, 2009; Rayamajhee, 2020; Skarbek, 2014). Because less formal, local associations and organizations are generally better equipped to mobilize local human capital, acquire the knowledge of time and place, and adapt to changing circumstances, they are better suited for high co-production activities than are formal institutions.…”

“…It is possible, for instance, to create incentives for the private provision of an otherwise ‘public’ good or service through markets or collective ‘club-like’ arrangements by bundling it with another complementary good or service for which excluding device exists (Demsetz 14 , 1970). In other cases, different types of goods and services can be bundled up and provided as CPR or club goods (Chamlee-Wright and Storr, 2009; Skarbek, 2014). Depending on the scope of complementarity, numerous configurations of goods and services are possible, with a wide range of possible positions in the typology matrix.…”

“…Similarly, in post-disaster cases such as the great Chicago fire of 1871, we have a situation in which public goods and private goods get ‘bundled up’ and transformed into a new ‘disaster relief’ package. However, unlike in the case of the lighthouse, the transformed bundle is neither exclusively private nor strictly public, but instead exhibits features of CPRs (Rayamajhee, 2020; Skarbek, 2014). This specific transformation occurred because the Chicago Relief and Aid Society (CRAS), a local voluntary association which took leadership roles in post-disaster recovery, determined that to be the best approach from among a range of other institutional possibilities.…”

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“…Participation pattern change from top-down mode to bottom-up [10] and community-based model [11]. Skarbek (2014) adopted a novel set of comprehensive donation and expenditure data collected from archival records to examine a bottom-up relief effort in the Chicago Fire of 1871, result show that individuals, businesses, corporate entities and municipal governments are able to finance the relief though donations [12]. Thaler, et al employed a mixed-methods approach, combining stakeholder workshops with a survey of 216 citizens at risk.…”

Prisonomics: Lessons from America's Mass Incarceration

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