Policy Studies Organization

Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, hjsmith@ou.edu (University of Oklahoma)

Risk and Disaster in Public Policy

Questions of risk, hazards and societal crises have always been with us, demanding that we increasingly learn to address and anticipate such issues, by creating sensible policies that may help ameliorate the damage and further improve our understanding and addressing of catastrophic events that greatly threaten our health and security. Under the hard circumstances of economic stress, how will our ability to effectively tackle such problems be challenged? And what implications should be considered at the moment of policy making?

Sponsored by the Policy Studies Organization and one of its newest publications, Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy (www.bepress.com/pso_risk/), published in cooperation with Berkeley Electronic Press, we would like to invite papers and proposals for a panel that will deal with crisis prediction, preparation, mitigation, response and recovery, among other issues. Many of these problems are already well documented but more answers are needed for what is a strongly emerging field in the study of public policy.