responding to "natural" disasters: the ethical implications of the voluntary state

Responding to "Natural" Disasters: The Ethical Implications of the Voluntary StateAuthor(s): Patricia Mooney Nickel and Angela M. EikenberrySource: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Dec., 2007), pp. 534-545Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25610895 .

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Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol. 29, No. 4, 2007: 534-545

Responding to "Natural" Disasters:

The Ethical Implications of

the Voluntary State

Patricia Mooney Nickel Victoria University of Wellington

Angela M. Eikenberry University of Nebraska at Omaha

ABSTRACT

Natural events are not automatically disasters; they become disasters

because of their negative impact on humanity. This paper argues that the wake of natural disasters exposes the ethical difficulty of the "vol

untary state." In particular, we demonstrate that the failures of the

voluntary state are exposed by disasters such as that caused by Hurri

cane Katrina. Such failures of the voluntary state offer an unfortu nate impetus for reconsidering the role of public administration

theory, which must now more than ever argue on behalf of the most

marginalized populations in an era that has wrongly declared their

well being to be a matter of choice.

In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlighten ment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster

triumphant. Horkheimer & Adorno (1944, p. 3)

INTRODUCTION

Disasters are powerful indicators of the state's relationship with the

most marginalized members of society. Perhaps because they appear to

be "natural," the disastrous effects of natural events such as Hurricane

Katrina invoke a discourse that the disastrous effects of neoliberalism

thus far have not. All events and effects that result in a level of human

suffering that can be labeled disastrous?natural and unnatural?de

serve equal attention. Humanitarian relief advocates have long recog nized that universal rights are accompanied by universal obligations

(Chatterjee, 2006); but what of the nation-state that creates conditions

under which human rights are violated (or protected) on a large scale?

?2007, Public Administration Theory Network



Mooney Nickel and Eikenberry 535

In this paper, we focus our attention not on the event and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina itself, but on the failures of the neoliberal state that

preceded the intersection of Hurricane Katrina and institutionalized

poverty and racism. We hope to shift the focus in the public administra tion and policy literature from "inadequate implementation" to a focus on the underlying ideology of disaster relief in a voluntary state.

Natural events are not automatically disasters', they become disasters because of their negative impact on human conditions created by the state and capitalism. Yet, it is clear that natural disasters transcend state

boundaries; indeed, natural disasters by their very nature do not recog nize national statehood and its management of risk, which are cognitive and social constructs (Beck, 1994, p. 6). How then are we to understand the state and public administration's responsibilities in relationship to disasters and response to disasters? In this paper we argue that, in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, ethical difficulties of the

voluntary state are exposed. To make this argument, we first provide an overview of the emerging voluntary state and its implications. Next, we draw on the case of Hurricane Katrina to support our assertions about the problematic ethical stance of the voluntary state. Finally, we con clude with a call for public administration and policy theorists to argue on behalf of the most marginalized populations in an era that has

wrongly declared human well-being a matter of choice.

THE EMERGING VOLUNTARY STATE

Labels such as "natural" and "disaster" covertly govern the world when they are embedded as pre-given rather than as pre-figured by po litical intention. Neoliberalism and its attempt to devolve responsibility for human welfare to the market (which cares not at all about human

beings except to the extent that they are the source of profit), has re sulted in widespread public opinion that the poverty and racism ex

posed by Hurricane Katrina were themselves somehow natural by virtue of resulting from the "natural" forces of the market. As David

Harvey (2007) explains:

The neoliberal state should favor strong individual property rights, the rule of law, and institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade. . .the elimination of poverty (both domestically and worldwide) can best be secured through free markets and free trade, (pp. 64-65)

As we discuss further below, the often hidden outcome is that market

ideology makes voluntary all but the protection of the market itself the



536 Administrative Theory & Praxis Vb/. 29, No. 4

state's sole responsibility becomes the creation of the conditions for

profit, disguising that it also creates the conditions for the disastrous

impacts of disasters like Hurricane Katrina (Giroux, 2006; Graham,

2006). When the source of suffering is divorced from the market, the state continues to function according to the myth of social "laws," such as the "laws" of the market, which govern through reification by mak

ing marginality seem "natural" (Agger, 1989).

The result of this myth of the market is the emergence of a "volun

tary state"?a state that views the market as its only responsibility and

labels all other responsibility "personal," thereby leaving the voluntary and discretionary redistribution of individual wealth as the only means

to achieve social welfare (Eikenberry & Nickel, 2006). There are two

mutually reinforcing components to the voluntary state. First, the vol

untary state creates the conditions for the creation of wealth and pov

erty and then lets the wealthy decide where to volunteer assistance to

the impoverished. Thus voluntary response seems benevolent, divorced

from the conditions that created the need for voluntary response in the

first place. In the case of disasters, the designification of need (Nickel &

Eikenberry, 2006) results from a failure to recognize how the state and

capitalism create the conditions for disasters in the first place (see also

Marable, 2000, on the underdevelopment of Black America).

The "hollow state" (Milward & Provan, 2000), or a state hollowed

out by neoliberalism, necessitates action by non-state actors, who act on

a supposedly voluntary basis. Part and parcel of the emergence of the

voluntary state is a growing global reliance on the supposed voluntary

emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in disaster relief

operations (Ozerdem & Jacoby, 2006). Indeed, today NGOs and civil

society more generally are viewed as the "magic bullet" for solving all

types of collective problems in the face of extensive government cut

backs (Chandoke, 2002, 2003; Edwards & Hulme, 1996). Such privileg

ing of NGOs is a re-articulation of the neoliberal policy agenda, which

dovetails with attempts to direct funds away from Third World govern ments to voluntary organizations in civil society. In relation to disaster

relief, Ozerdem and Jacoby (2006) note "the pre-eminence of neo-lib

eral economic orthodoxy has resulted in an abdication of governmental

responsibility during times of crisis, in an erosion of states' ability to

mobilise the citizenry generally and in a penetration of the third sector"

(p. 21). This leaves NGOs to take on the task of voluntarily managing

disasters, even though they often lack the skills, finances and coercive

powers to do so.




This discussion of an emerging voluntary state builds on what Geof Wood (1997) has called the "franchise state" and Tvedt (2006) de scribes as "a form of state-led global philanthropy" (p. 682). In particu lar, Wood (1997) is frustrated by neoliberalism's devolution of state

responsibility to NGOs: "The debate, therefore, about the state

franchising its responsibilities to NGOs is about a trend which needs to be examined carefully before it takes further root." He concludes, how

ever, "we must search for what the market can do for the poor" (p. 90). Perhaps because of a failure to recognize that the "market" holds little truth in late capitalism (see Mandel, 1972), Wood fails to understand the relationship between the market, the state, and the rise of NGOs as service providers in an era of neoliberalism. Not only has Wood's franchise state taken root, it has become further embedded in the ideol

ogy of the voluntary state: the social welfare functions of the state are not only franchised, they are also optional (Nickel, 2007). The state is "liberated" from its traditional responsibility of providing for the pre conditions of human flourishing (Chandoke, 2003, p. 79).

The second component to the voluntary state is the notion of per sonal responsibility within a social system over which one has no con trol. Not only is the state's responsibility reframed as a matter of

voluntary action, but this is further embedded by framing the inhumane conditions imposed upon the poor in this system as resulting from their

voluntary choice. As Herbert Gans (1995) explains: "the poor may not

get much help from their fellow citizens as long as they think that so

many of the poor are not deserving of help" (p. 118). From the 1980s to

today, neoliberal conservatives have focused anti-welfare efforts on

blaming the poor themselves and the misguided interventions of gov ernment for the conditions of poverty. Similar arguments were made

during the nineteenth century in the United States, when Social Dar winism was well regarded. Social Darwinists opposed all state aid to the

poor: "to seek to mitigate misery was to put in abeyance the fundamen tal arrangements by which nature ensured progress" (Galbraith, 1984, p. 49).

Poverty is not voluntary or natural; it is systematically created by a

voluntary state that can afford, but is not willing to afford to end pov erty (Gans, 1995, p. 118). As we discuss further below, vulnerability to disasters is not voluntary, but results from a host of spatial determina tions that reflect the "social and political structure, the availability of resources (or lack thereof), stratification and inequality, population pressures. . .and environmental degradation, among other factors"

(Rodriguez & Russell, 2006, p. 194). The poor do not voluntarily locate



538 Administrative Theory & Praxis <*Vol. 29, No. 4

themselves in the path of disaster. This idea of voluntary choice fails to

recognize that the assumptions of neoliberalism, the voluntary state, and the notion that vulnerability is voluntary are mutually reinforcing: they all locate responsibility elsewhere. They fail to understand that it is

mean-spirited global capitalism and its unrelenting drive for profit that is responsible for these conditions in the first place.

DISASTER RELIEF IN THE VOLUNTARY STATE: THE CASE OF HURRICANE KATRINA

The discussion of Hurricane Katrina in the public administration and

policy literature to date has almost exclusively focused on the list of

bureaucratic breakdowns in response to Katrina. This list is long and

troubling but largely ignores that the failures associated with relief in

Katrina's aftermath were much more deep-seated and insidious than

simply unpreparedness, a word that disguises that "the marginals are in

fact internal to the bourgeois system. . .the purity of society is already contaminated by a blight it would prefer, for its own protection, to con

sider as external" (Ryan, 1982, p. 127). Frankly, in the case of the vic

tims in the aftermath of Katrina, there is little to be learned from

discussing procedure or lack thereof in response to Hurricane Katrina.

Discussions about chains of command and responsibility only blind us

through bureaucratic cacophony to the more important issue, which is:

what kind of society creates the conditions that result in one population with the means to escape suffering and another population without the means to escape suffering. The answer to questions about how we ought to have responded is simple: here in the richest country in the world no

expense should have been spared in response to those in need. Priority should have been given to the marginalized and most vulnerable people in New Orleans and other affected areas.

Discussions about how to respond to disasters too frequently neglect the question of how to create a society in which such disasters need not

have such devastating impact. The disaster in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast was decades in the making. The disaster was not the

event of Hurricane Katrina; the disaster was the existence of pervasive social inequality and the state's defense of such inequality as a volun

tary choice. The problem is that the state was not willing to help the

victims of Hurricane Katrina before (and after) the actual event took

place. We argue here that the failure to behave humanely towards the

most marginalized in society is due in large part to the ideology of the

voluntary state. Voluntarism is particularistic (Salamon, 1995) and thus

a voluntary state is unable to adequately address problems associated




with social and economic inequality. Indeed, when voluntarism be comes social policy, marginality is cemented rather than transformed

(Eikenberry & Nickel, 2006). As an example, Ozerdem and Jacoby

(2006) found in their analysis of civil society response efforts in the

wake of several major earthquakes around the world that civil society

organizations are "unable to prevent post-earthquake urban renewal

programs from following earlier policies of investing in middle to high income units" (p. 5).

Katrina's aftermath put into a microcosm what many experience eve

ryday?poverty, state failures, and multitudes of injustices. Hazards

only exacerbate existing conditions of vulnerability, such as a fragile physical environment, poverty and inadequate social and institutional structures. Thus, this "natural" disaster was under-girded by social con

structions and structural causes of marginalization, disenfranchisement and the racial exclusion of the poor. As Rodriguez and Russell (2006) point out, "A hazard event does not necessarily cause a disaster; these are essentially 'triggering' events that interact with the social and eco

nomic environment, particularly impacting populations that are highly vulnerable" (p. 194). Poor societies with fragile physical environments, weak economies, and inadequate social and institutional structures are

disproportionately likely to experience a disaster from a natural hazard in the first place (Ozerdem & Jacoby, 2006, p. 9). New Orleans and the

surrounding Gulf Coast area clearly are among the poorest areas in the United States and for this and other reasons, suffered from inadequate per capita expenditures on human services, education, community im

provement and so on (Smith, 2006, p. 6). As Krause (2006) points out,

though Katrina and water from the flooding took away victims' posses sions and livelihoods, many were "made vulnerable beforehand

through the labor market, the punitive institutions of the state and a lack of social provision" (para. 13).

It can hardly be considered humane that individuals are held "solely responsible for costs whose causes are beyond their control" (Krause, 2006, para. 10). Those holding high ground?predominantly white and

middle-upper class?could choose to stay or go before (and after) the storm. Those living in lower areas did not have such choices. Yet, offi cial evacuation plans counted on individuals being able to have the choice to drive away from danger. The city of New Orleans' "planned" response to a potential disaster relied heavily on the hopes that neigh bors and congregation members would help New Orleans' immobile

population leave the city in an emergency (Kiefer & Montjoy, 2006). Graham (2006) argues that the rhetoric of the administration:



540 Administrative Theory & Praxis +>Vol. 29, No. 4

Backed by an almost complete absence of organised, public evacu ation procedures, suggested one simple but powerful thing: if you can't get out of the city (like rich, suburban, auto owners) it's your fault. End of story. The escapees are normal, respectful, citizens.

You're not." (para. 14)

Graham (2006) continues to write:

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, as the vast majority of New Orleans' affluent, suburban and white communities evacuated

themselves north using their private cars after the order to do so, Michael Chertoff, Bush's Secretary of Homeland Secretary, made a

striking remark. Defending his administration's decision to basi

cally abandon those who failed to leave using their own transport to their own devices, and ignoring the fact that most poor residents

stayed because they simply had no means to escape, Chertoff ar

gued that "the critical thing was to get people out of [New Orleans] before the disaster. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part." (para. 13)

The subtext of such a statement by a public official in the U.S. De

partment of Homeland Security is that suffering is a voluntary choice.

As Gans (1995) and Krause (2006) point out, such an assumption reifies

the necessity of marginality. Not only marginality but also the mainte

nance of the neoliberal state depends upon the mutually reinforcing false assumptions that: first, human welfare can, like discretionary con

sumption, be relegated to the realm of voluntary action; and, second, that human welfare is a matter of voluntary and individual choice.

Henry Giroux forcefully focuses our attention on the neoliberal agenda as a politics of disposability revealed most clearly by Katrina and its

aftermath. According to Giroux (2006), the bodies that appeared all

over New Orleans after Katrina "laid bare racial and class fault lines

that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy and reveal

the emergence of a new kind of politics?one in which entire popula tions are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state

coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves" (p. 10). He writes that:

The events surrounding Katrina are about more than incompe

tence, lack of compassion, and ignorance; they are the consequence of a systematic, violent form of social engineering in which those

populations in the United States marginalized by race and class are now considered disposable?that is, simply collateral damage in the construction of a neoliberal order, (p. 11)

Giroux's claim reveals the problematic ethical considerations re

vealed when the state is no longer obligated to take measures to pre




vent hardship, suffering, and death. Where the disadvantaged are

already seen as dead within the neoliberal economic/political frame work: "entire populations expelled from the benefits of the market

place are reified as products without any value, to be disposed of as

'leftovers in the most radical and effective way'" (Giroux, 2006, p. 28). This is frighteningly similar to the rhetoric of Social Darwinism where

many supporters believed, for example, that: "he who loses his life be cause of his stupidity, vice, or idleness is in the same class as the victims of weak viscera or malformed limbs. . .it is best they should die" (Hof stadter, 1945, p. 27).

We are thus faced with more than just the franchising of the state, which is no less problematic merely by the fact that we find the problem to be worse than devolution. The problem is greater than a state made thin by privatization (Terry, 2005)?we are now faced with a voluntary state that proposes that social responsibility is optional (Nickel, 2007). The violence of human disposability highlighted by Giroux (2006) forces us to re-think the ethical implications of the voluntary state. Per

haps most disturbing is the realization that non-state actors not only choose to respond to the violence of disasters, but also choose to create them by actively and tacitly supporting a state that makes all but re

sponsibility for the market voluntary. More than a decade of "franchising" to voluntary organizations has

resulted in widespread acceptance of the voluntary sector as the space where state action takes place (or does not take place, depending on whether the option of action is appealing to donors). Meanwhile, this movement has silently endorsed neoliberalism by disguising it as an up surge in humanitarianism. Tvedt (2006) tacitly makes this point: "some of the most influential researchers have themselves been instrumental in creating the very language with which system actors?as a communi cative entity?have tried to measure their achievements. . .thus giving administrative-political decisions and processes added legitimacy" (p. 681). Meanwhile, disasters are increasing in frequency in a period of

unprecedented wealth and prosperity for a growing circle of wealthy individuals with shrinking obligations to the state once charged with

managing the relief of such events. In this environment:

Need becomes something towards which we direct resources on an

individual basis, absolving the system of responsibility for the abuses that it renders. This individualization of need immediately absolves society as a whole of responsibility for the needs of its members and social responsibility becomes individual responsibil ity. (Eikenberry & Nickel, 2006, p. 13)



542 Administrative Theory & Praxis Vb/. 29, No. 4

CONCLUSION: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF

THE VOLUNTARY STATE

The voluntary state endorses suffering for some depending on an in dividual's ability to fend for oneself in a structurally biased market or

the voluntary leanings of those who have enough surplus wealth and wherewithal to opt into the voluntary sector (Nickel, 2007). To the ex tent that the voluntary state slowly dismantles the late capitalist state's

obligation to intervene on behalf of those marginalized by the market, it may be that we are in fact headed towards a new global consciousness

of suffering. As facilitators of this global consciousness, public adminis

tration theorists must now more than ever argue on behalf of the most

marginalized populations in an era that has wrongly declared human

well being a matter of choice. Social responsibility towards those who are marginalized and suffering cannot be optional; it is absolutely and

without question mandatory for any society that hopes to avoid the

travesties that result from considering some less worthy of basic human

ity (and even life) than others.

The voluntary state is an obvious departure from public administra

tion theory's ethical grounding in constitutionalism (Rohr, 1986; Spicer & Terry, 1993) because it locates state responsibility beyond the na

tional constitution or any other constitutional arrangement. Indeed, it

abandons the state as a locus of responsibility at all, shifting social re

sponsibility to the global, ephemeral realm. What is the legitimate basis

for a public administration ethic dominated by market logic? The ethi

cal implications of the voluntary state must be further explored and

those PA theorists who have suggested partnering with citizens and citi

zens groups through deliberative discourse will be important to this ef

fort (for example: King & Zanetti, 2005; McSwite, 1996; Stivers, 1996;

Ventriss, 1987; Zanetti, 1997). In this deliberative tradition, we have ar

gued elsewhere (Nickel & Eikenberry, 2006) that public administration

scholars and public administrators need to narrate a world of alterna

tives and do so in partnership with those most marginalized by the mar

ket. The challenge for public administration theory is to deepen our

commitment to exposing, resignifying and overcoming the false perma nence of marginality.




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Patricia Mooney Nickel is a Lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Stud ies at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research interests include critical social theory, public sociology, social policy, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, sociology of public administration and governance, and critical theories

of the state and civil society.

Angela M. Eikenberry is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, School of Public Administration. Her main research interests include civil society, nonprofit organizations and philanthropy and their role in demo cratic governance.



responding to "natural" disasters: the ethical implications of the voluntary state

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