Vulnerability and Resilience in Local Government: Assessing the Strength of Performance Regimes

ous materials spills or more exceptional such as earthquakes or terrorist attacks. It is the truly extreme of major proportion, however, that capture the attention of policy makers and the public alike.1 These sudden, infrequent focusing events that cause great harm typically produce policy change?often major policy change (Birkland 1997). A con temporary example would be the comprehen sive redesign of the homeland security policy in the United States following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Although an ordinary event that is smaller in scale or episodic may fail to generate widespread attention, it too can have substantial deleterious consequences for the affected community. Ultimately, all com munities are at risk, even if the probability of a hazardous event and its severity vary. Vulner ability is ubiquitous, and local governments have the unenviable task of dealing with it.