Navigating Diverse Agency Priorities in Emergency Management: A Framework for Hazard Mitigation

Hazard mitigation planning requires disparate agencies to negotiate through the planning and implementation processes. These agencies must strategize, develop, and implement plans for addressing scenarios of natural and human-caused hazards. Competing perspectives exist in systems engineering at multiple levels of governance. This paper introduces a framework to understand and coordinate when one or more agencies have outlier perspectives of the priority ordering of initiatives in regional hazard mitigation. Each agency perspective is represented as a scenario that disrupts system order. The paper presents a mathematical framework with 40 initiatives, six ordering criteria, and eight scenarios. The method coordinates evidence and experience that are essential to negotiation of requirements among emergency managers in hazard mitigation planning in the postpandemic era.