Comprehensive emergency management and COVID-19 response efforts as evidence of policy learning

Comprehensive emergency management principles serve as the bedrock to most local government emergency management efforts across the United States. In theory, pandemic planning and response should have been part of this effort. Hildebrand and Malone demonstrated that comprehensive emergency management principles were utilized when addressing the early demands of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020. However, the use of specific tools and attitudes regarding the pandemic and government efforts at all levels to respond to its demands varied widely. With evolving circumstances—including new information about the virus and its impact, a change in federal level (at minimum), the interpretation and implementation of policies and mandates across federal, state, and local levels—these conditions challenged traditional emergency operations. It remains unclear whether attitudes and use of comprehensive emergency management tools have changed. To address this gap, this paper uses an updated survey conducted in summer 2021 to investigate such changes. The results suggest that local emergency management professionals, while generally satisfied with their own performance, learned that there were more issues with preparation and response compared with Hildebrand and Malone’s study in addressing the demands of COVID-19 in their jurisdiction, particularly as they worked with other agencies/departments and political actors from the federal, state, and local levels of government who were not as familiar with, or generally discounted traditional comprehensive emergency management-based principles for emergency operations as they related to the pandemic.