ABSTRACT
Human societies achieve common goals and reconcile differences through the institutions that they create or inherit, whether those institutions are effective or not, constructive or destructive, democratic or autocratic, well informed or ignorant, formal or informal. Emergency managers and organizations charged with preparing for and managing disasters largely do an admirable and crucially important job. However, this task can only be performed as well as the institutional system within which these people and organizations are embedded, enabled and constrained allows it to be. We argue that insufficient attention has been paid to higher-order policy and institutional settings for emergencies and disasters, and note how the issue of institutions has emerged consistently throughout previous chapters.
