FARAZMAND, Ali

Learning from the Katrina Crisis : a global and international perspective with implications for future crisis management - Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers, December 2007

The study of crisis and emergency management—or mismanagement—during Hurricane Katrina will continue to proliferate in the near future. This article presents a global and international perspective on Katrina as a case of "grand failure" in crisis and emergency management, with lessons and implications for future crisis management. Benefiting from empirical data collected from international interviews, the essay presents a theoretical analysis of emergency governance and crisis management, discusses a detailed global perspective on Katrina crisis management as "management and leadership crisis," offers a number of key lessons learned from Katrina, and draws policy and administrative recommendations for future crisis and emergency management through a theory of "surprise management" that is adaptive, collaborative, and citizen engaging and draws on chaos and complexity theories to cope with hyper-uncertainties and unknowns