ABSTRACT

The purpose of this final chapter is to tease out of the story of planning in time of crisis, lessons that may be useful to planners in other crisis contexts. The survey of the literature in Chapter 2 left us with a rather pessimistic view of the role of planning in times of crisis. We saw how most of the authors in the public policy and planning fields equate crises with disasters and devote little attention to “positive” crises (exceptions were Bryson 1981 and, to a modest extent, Rosenthal and Kouzmin 1997). We also saw how most of the theoretical schemes place crises in an enigmatic realm where planning techniques are either unknown or doomed to failure (Christensen 1985, 1999 excepted). I tagged this type of problem “fourth quadrant” problem because in all of the frameworks surveyed it was placed by the authors in the fourth cell of a two-bytwo table. Crises are not infrequent occurrences. Yet as Rosenthal and Kouzmin (1997) note, 1 despite the increase in empirical research, the body of theory is scant. Only a few useful concepts have been offered to date for understanding crises. They do not provide a comprehensive prism for analyzing the changing role of public policy and planning during the various stages of a crisis.