Emergency risk communication and sensemaking during smoke events: A survey of practitioners.

Emergency risk communication (ERC) for smoke emitted from major fires continues to challenge governments. During these events, practitioners (including scientific, communication, and emergency response government staff) are tasked with quickly making sense of the public health risks and the communication options available. Practitioners' sensemaking-the process of creating meaning from information about an unfolding emergency-is key to effective ERC. This article identifies the factors that ERC practitioners consider the most important to their sensemaking for smoke events. A survey of practitioners (n = 86) was conducted to elicit their views on the level of importance of 22 different factors (individual, organizational, and contextual) on their sensemaking. The results indicate that the majority of the factors tested are very important to practitioners. This finding likely reflects the multidimensional nature of emergency smoke events and provides evidence as to why practitioners are challenged when trying to make sense of emergency situations. Despite multiple factors being considered very important to practitioners, the time-limited nature of emergencies means that practitioners will inevitability be forced to prioritize in their sensemaking efforts. Our results also provide insight into practitioners' prioritization of different information sources. Specifically, practitioners prioritize their own knowledge and the knowledge of other practitioners. The two most important factors were information from other incident management stakeholders and the practitioners' past experience. Other information, including community-based and academic knowledge, appear to be of lower priority for practitioners. Based on the study results, recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.

Unpacking the Realities and Complexities of Sensemaking: Government Practitioners' Experiences of Emergency Risk Communication.

During public health emergencies, government practitioners must rapidly make sense of the risk to human health and the emergency risk communication (ERC) options available. These practitioners determine what, how, and when information is communicated to the public. Recurring criticism of ERC indicates that the communication is not meeting the needs of the community. To improve ERC practice, it is therefore critical to understand practitioners' sensemaking in these complex and time-critical settings. This article unpacks the realities and complexities of sensemaking, the process by which practitioners create meaning from the information they receive about an emergency as it unfolds. Qualitative interviews gathered practitioners' lived experiences of public health emergencies, namely, smoke events (e.g., wildfires and industrial facility fires), and thematic analysis drew on sensemaking literature. The evidence shows that sensemaking is challenging, as practitioners experience pressure from the emergency context and organizational, political, and social expectations. Sensemaking for ERC comes with an underlying imperative to accurately make sense of the situation, in a timely manner and in a way that leads to the best health outcomes. Practitioners must balance creating plausible meaning (sensemaking) with the accuracy expected by stakeholders. The analysis also highlights how sensemaking scope is delimited by professional expert identities and roles within the emergency management system; that is, practitioners' understanding of their expertise and role, and that of other practitioners. Past lived experiences are viewed as key facilitators of both individual and collective sensemaking, and the history of similar public health events shapes sensemaking in this context.

"It's not what you see but what you hear ": Understanding environment protection officers' responsive decision making.

Responsive regulation asserts that regulatory enforcement actions are likely to be more effective in promoting compliance when they respond to a duty holder's motives, capabilities, and external pressures. However, operationalizing responsive approaches that also possess qualities of consistency and transparency remains a challenge for environmental management authorities. This study applied a mixed-method qualitative approach to capture the responsive decision making influences on government environment protection officers in a field context when engaging with different duty holders. These insights then informed compliance narratives across a series of business behavior segments to guide more consistent, transparent and responsive decision making among environment protection officers. Our findings revealed how different constellations of observations, interactions and displays of willingness and ability impact the choice of regulatory responses. Challenges encountered in applying responsive regulation in practice involved difficulties ascertaining business capability, identifying causal links between response strategies and compliance outcomes, and how the use of discretion can impact on consistent and transparent decision making.

Facilitating adaptive management in a government program: A household energy efficiency case study.

Interim evaluations of government programs can sometimes reveal lower than expected outcomes, leading to the question of how adjustments can be made while the program is still underway. Although adaptive management frameworks can provide a practical roadmap to address this question, a lack of successful learnings and poor implementation have hampered the progress and wider application of adaptive management. Using a case study involving an energy efficiency government program targeting low-income households, this article provides supporting evidence on how adaptive management can be facilitated and applied. Factors such as proactive and responsive leadership, establishing a research-practice interface, and recognizing the skills, expertise, and contributions of multiple stakeholders guided adjustments to the program, and later paved the way for longer-term organizational learning that impacted how other programs are delivered. Implications for knowledge and practice, and a discussion of the challenges faced in the program, advance current thinking in adaptive management.