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<br />. <br /> <br />. <br /> <br />. <br /> <br />ROO-I? <br /> <br />Robert Olson Associates, <br />Inc. <br />100 EglotTCircle <br />Folsom, CA 95630 <br />Phn: 916-989-6201 <br />Fax: 916-989-6203 <br />Email: robtatroaiWaol.com <br /> <br />EARTHQUAKE DISASTERS AND POLICY CHANGE: <br />A "PATTERNED OPPORTUNISM" MODEL OF CALIFORNIA SEISMIC <br />SAFETY CHANGES <br /> <br />PROJECT SUMMARY <br /> <br />California is often taken as a model for seismic safety policy, both nationally and <br />internationally. While it is true that California has been innovative and constitutes a kind <br />of policy system model, achieving that status was much more difficult and problematic <br />than many practitioners and researchers appreciate. Using data from archives, <br />documents, tapes and transcripts from a major oral history project, and participant- <br />observation, this project provides a more complete and accurate understanding of how <br />California rose to its current position of seismic safety prominence. <br /> <br />The project has two specific and complementary objectives. The first is the development <br />of a detailed history of 12 major pieces of California seismic safety legislation covering <br />more than 50 years, emphasizing the classic question of policy analysis and politics: <br />"Who said what to whom, in which channel, and to what effect?" The focus will be on <br />the origins of the 12 pieces oflegislation and the negotiating and compromising involved <br />in moving them through the legislative process to passage, executive enactment, and <br />implementation. <br /> <br />The second objective is the explication and testing of a model, called here "Patterned <br />Opportunism," that takes a particular subset of seismic safety policies (building safety) <br />and attempts to explain policy learning and evolution, especially at the state level, by <br />interrelating disaster events, institutional capacity-building, and policy innovation. The <br />model is refined by breaking mitigation policy into "prospective" and "retroactive" types <br />and suggesting that different numbers of learning events (earthquake disasters) were <br />necessary in California to achieve the two different types of policy innovations. <br /> <br />Moreover, it is suggested that the model's iterations over time-and the contraction in the <br />number of necessary learning events-were a function of the development of increased <br />institutional capacity, giving various seismic safety advocacy groups regularized access <br />to policy agendas and enhanced abilities to influence state legislative consideration of <br />proposed innovations. <br /> <br />NSF Grant No. CMS-9814239 <br />[Ref: projectsllifeworklmisclabstract.docI April 18, 2000] <br />