| Emergency Telecommunications and Mitigation-Oriented Policymaking |
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| Written by Gordon Gow | |
| Monday, 17 January 2005 | |
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Page 4 of 5 Despite commendable work done in the field of emergency telecommunications in both the public and private sectors, there remains a significant oversight; namely, that most policy research has been confined to the national security/emergency preparedness domain. There has been research done to examine the regulatory dimensions of disaster preparedness for telecommunications in developing nations (Samarajiva, 2001; Srivastava and Samarajiva, 2001) but while representing an important starting point, it is only preliminary work and much more needs to be done in the area. Work has also been done in the domain of international humanitarian assistance in conjunction with the UN’s Working Group on Emergency Telecommunications and its efforts behind the Tampere Convention (Harbi, 2001). If one draws comparisons across all the domains of emergency telecommunications, however, it becomes evident that research is predominantly focussed on dealing with unsafe conditions through improved risk management, enhanced preparedness, or the development of advanced planning and recovery strategies. For instance, though the domains of ‘lifeline engineering’ and ‘business continuity planning’ adopt a somewhat more proactive approach to emergency planning, research in neither domain deals specifically with the fundamental processes that influence the development and deployment of the telecommunications infrastructure in the first place. Within both public and private sectors, telecom policy research seems to have largely ignored the underlying causes of risk and vulnerability. This is a significant oversight given the rapid deployment of new technologies within the wider context of global telecom reform and information society initiatives. Among other things, telecom reform has introduced competition into former monopoly markets, leading to new dynamic pressures in the form of radical restructuring of the sector, the appearance of new stakeholder groups and investors, and a dramatic increase in spending and attention paid to innovation (Bauer, 2003). On the one hand, these dynamic pressures produce new opportunities that include flexible and cost-effective telecommunications services to support emergency management and public alerting. On the other hand, they also produce hidden risks and vulnerabilities when rapid technological developments, impulsive investment, and uncoordinated decision-making processes lead to the formation of problematic path dependencies in network infrastructure. Making the most of innovation and reducing the long-term risks associated with a rapidly changing infrastructure means investigating the deeper relationships behind these processes, including economic conditions, political climate, and cultural attitudes. Today, the concept of emergency telecommunications must be expanded to include a study of the wider social forces that confront dynamic pressures in the telecom and communications sectors and that produce unsafe conditions—including unsafe conditions created by deliberate inaction or accidental oversight on the part of governments and infrastructure owner/operators. Such conditions are characterized by a reluctance to invest in mitigation initiatives, unforeseen infrastructure interdependencies, and potentially high human and economic costs of recovery following a critical incident. However, within this expanded conception, the term ‘emergency telecommunications’ sheds its intuitive value because the dominant concern is no longer with emergencies per se but rather with the assessment and long-term management of large technical systems. I would propose therefore that it is at this point, located at the intersection between unsafe conditions and their social production, that we cross a logical and semantic boundary from the domain of ‘emergency telecommunications’ into the wider field more suitably termed ‘management of critical infrastructure.’ Crossing this boundary is an important first step in moving toward a new policy framework. The Indian Ocean disaster has taught us a frightful lesson once again: policymakers must shift their perspective away from the economics of short-term gain and toward long-range development and the deeply rooted sources of risk and vulnerability in society. Disaster mitigation is a concept intimately related to ‘sustainable development’ and in the realm of telecom policy and regulation it must come to be seen as a fundamental social concern that coexists along side the more traditional objectives such as universal service. |
