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Learning from disaster events and exercises in civil protection organizations

Date: 2017-05-29      View counts: 3513    

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Civil protection organizations focus their activities on minimising or preventing the impacts of hazards on the population. A central mechanism used to increase the effectiveness and consistency of civil protection processes and actions is the ability to learn from past experiences, regardless of whether these experiences resulted in positive or negative outcomes. Actually, failures can often be more important for learning processes than successes. Finding ways to systematically collect and analyse experiences, and turn the results into learning opportunities, can underpin organizational preparation in the context of disasters and emergencies. Organizational learning is a process built on the direct and indirect (from other organizations) experiences of an organization. The organization must be able to interpret these experiences, assisted by the creation of a collective memory that is readily accessible, which in turn fosters a culture of learning. These process elements must be coupled with a purposeful modifcation of routine and behaviour that reflects new knowledge and the organization’s stated objectives.

This report focuses on understanding how civil protection organizations learn from direct or indirect experiences (events), and planned learning processes (exercises). The work is based on information gained from desktop analysis and interviews with civil protection representatives or researchers from the case study countries concerning international events and exercises. We examined how these events were reported, evaluated, and then (if at all) acted on organizationally, and how the information was used to inform adaptive processes in the context of the national civil protection system. An implicit assumption of the authors was that civil protection organizations should be learning organizations that document and respond to operational, coordination, and planning issues if and when they are recognized. By exploring a range of international cases, this study seeks to provide recommendations on good practice, reporting and evaluation, and provide insights into how international civil protection organizations have responded to challenging events or informative exercises. The report compares and contrasts international civil protection organizations’ responses to a range of possible natural, social, and technological events.


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Learning from disaster events and exercises in civil protection organizations

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