Comfort, Louise K.

Comfort, Louise K. 2007. Crisis Management in Hindsight: Cognition, Communication, Coordination, and Control. Public Administration Review Vol. 67, no. s1: 189-197. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2007.00827.x/pdf (accessed 26 October 2011).

This article argues that cognition is central to performance in emergency management. Cognition is defined as the capacity to recognize the degree of emerging risk to which a community is exposed and to act on that information. Using the case of Hurricane Katrina to illustrate the collapse of the standard model of emergency management without a clear focus on the role of cognition, the author reframes the concept of intergovernmental crisis management as a complex, adaptive system.