One Program Logic To Rule Them All
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, head office
In an earlier post, I mentioned a time when I decided to try my hand at devising a program logic for the climate change work of the department. Not because I was actually responsible for it, but because I just felt like having a crack. I was a little dissatisfied with our officially professed goals, which while lofty (“Minimise the impacts of climate change in NSW”) didn’t feel particularly strongly connected to things that the department could a) achieve or b) measure.
It is time, dear reader, to unveil this logic for you, but I won’t dwell on it because it is but a mere prelude to another hare-brained idea of mine, a program logic for fire management. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here is my suggestion for how the department should have structured their official goals
Overarching outcome
People make decisions based on the best available climate change information.
High level outcomes
People have the best available climate change information
People know how to base decisions on the best available climate change information
People are motivated to base decisions on the best available climate change information
Sub-outcomes (People have cc info)
Climate change information is curated
Climate change information is created
Climate change information is available
Climate change information is accessed
Sub-outcomes (People know how to base decisions on cc info)
People understand their exposure to current climate means and extremes
People understand how climate change relates to their decision making
People understand how to use climate change information
Sub-outcomes (People are motivated to make decisions based on cc info)
Laws, regulations, norms, incentives [I had gotten a bit lazy by this point and didn’t elaborate here]
I won’t go into my reasoning now and I haven’t considered whether it stands up some 10 plus years after I wrote it. But that’s ok. You can kinda see where I was aiming.
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Fast forward a few years, and an obscure minor deliverable in Work Package 6 of the NSW Bushfire Hub, which I had the good fortune of leading, related to evaluation of fire management. I tried but could not for the life of me get my hands on any thorough, official designation of just what made good fire management good. Being the trailblazing procrastinator that I am, I came up with my own fire management program logic. Again, there was no threat of responsibility. As with my climate change program logic, it mostly served as a reliable dust-accumulating device rather than any kind of input to policy or decision-making. So much for my expertise in research impact.
Behold:
The key ingredients are
an understanding of fire
an understanding of things we care about that are influenced by fire
a willingness to distinguish contributions to risk mitigation from fire management, wildfire and elsewhere
There’s a few other airy fairy, lefty ideas in there like transparency, cost-effectiveness and democracy.
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I recently submitted an application for an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Sometime between 25 July and August 7 2024 I’ll find out whether I was one of the lucky 20% that got funded. In the application I promise to come up with some kind of new-fangled framework for assessing the cost-effectiveness of fire management across the whole dang disaster spectrum, from preparation to preparedness, to response and finally recovery.
Should it come to pass, and perhaps even if it shouldn’t, I’ll come up with another program logic of sorts to try to spell out the concrete links between fire management, risk mitigation and return on investment. Here’s a figure alluding to a potential new framework, which I whacked on the all-important page one of the grant application.
So, dear reader, do my program logics pass the laugh test? In what field will I strike next with my amateurish attempts to craft alternative program logics? What does a good one even look like? And are there in fact any good program logics out there?
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Apparently this is Future Fire’s 50th post. Happy Birthday to me! Thanks for reading. There’s no telling how long I’ll be able to maintain this kind of output - to speak nothing of quality. You can inspect (and if necessary black out) the dying embers of posts past in the Future Fire Archive.