Organizing after disaster : the (re)emergence of organization within government after Katrina (2005) and the Touhoku Tsunami (2011).

Summary Disasters overwhelm plans and collapse governmental organizations, which sometimes manage to rebuild themselves into something new. Using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in northeast Japan, this thesis examines how local and meso-governmental structures reorganize, and what this tells us about the role of the state in disaster response. Crisis management centers (CMCs) may lose control of part of the response entirely, but in most cases they reorganize themselves to become relevant. In doing so, they express and, to some extent, create the idealized image that the state has of itself in response to a crisis. Operational teams gradually build more elaborate structures. As their processes become more routine, these teams often find themselves faced with decisions for which they have no formal basis, and their choices reflect an ad hoc and personal conception of the role of the state. Although the evaluations project professionalism and stability, an examination of the processes shows that in these cases they were divergent and improvised. What we see at all these levels is a struggle to rebuild normal life. Disasters reaffirm government - demonstrating why stability is to be valued - and threaten it existentially. As a result, disaster response is not treated as a public policy area.