St Maarten, Fostering Resilient Crisis Management

St Maarten is frequently affected by various types of crisis such as hurricanes and floods, and has a high risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. Although its governments’ crisis management has significantly improved since Irma, information management remains a weak spot in its crisis management system while this is the backbone of efficient coordination between all crisis teams. The ambition is to change this into a situation where information sharing between government entities is improved, self-sustaining crisis management training and education capacities are in place and maintained, crisis management capacity is strengthened with clear standard operating procedures for various types of crisis, and regional actors have endorsed shared principles for crisis coordination.

The wider objective of the project is to anchor the long-term resilience and self-sufficiency of the Government of St Maarten in the field of crisis management.
The specific objective is to improve capacities of government entities in St Maarten in the fields of crisis management, information management and human resources and capacities in order to anticipate and adapt to crises, provide for a swift response in future calamities; and to work towards self-sufficiency in the field of crisis management training by setting up a knowledge centre.

The technical assistance provided aims at delivering and realising the following results:

O1.1: Netcentric information management in use with new function profiles and a functional back office and information system;
O2.1: Training and education strategy under implementation;
O3.1: Standard operating procedures for various types of crises (scale, severity, type) are developed and trained;
O4.1: Proposal for regional crisis coordination is completed.

The project is all about technical assistance and capacity building. It proposes a multi-level support trajectory that works towards self-sufficiency by enhancing individual, institutional and regional capacities. It also has a specific eye for embedding results by ensuring strategies and policies are adopted and ownership of what has been achieved lies at the Government of St Maarten.

Services delivered include:

• The development of profiles for positions related to netcentric working (such as loggers, plotters, information coordinators) will support ESF staff in carrying out their information management duties by clearly defining roles and expectations. These profiles and related procedures are a prerequisite for setting up an automated crisis information system, as digital systems rely on the human procedures behind them.
• Likewise, the back office for information management between EOC and ESFs needs to be further defined and operationalised, to ensure a steering role in information sharing between ESF groups, and in feeding the EOC with strategic information without burdening it with tactical information that should be addressed at ESF-level.
• The establishment of communication flows and administrative procedures between the ESF groups and EOC, and between ESF groups, will help standardize structural information flows.
• Finally, the above-mentioned established procedures will feed the set-up and introduction of an automated information management system to facilitate netcentric working.
• The development of a knowledge centre with resource library, online courses and trainings will enable the Government of St Maarten to collect and institutionalise the available crisis management knowledge. Government staff can consult documentation and crisis management plans at the resource library, can centrally access the available online courses, and can follow trainings.
• Function-specific trainings across government, such as trainings for loggers, plotters and information coordinators, will be organised at the knowledge centre to ensure that all crisis management staff is able to carry out their role.
• Trainings on decision-making in crisis management are organised at the knowledge centre for EOC and the Council of Ministers. These trainings will include the use of EOC Rules of Order, trainings on the EOC’s standard operational procedures, and sessions on the division of tasks and responsibilities between EOC and the Council.
• Trainings-of-trainers will solidify training capacities in St Maarten. By training government staff to become knowledgeable experts themselves, knowledge on crisis management will be continuously spread en kept up-to-date throughout government.
• The development of a crisis escalation structure to clarify which scale of the crisis structure will need to be activated. For instance, for smaller-scale crises such as floods, it might not be necessary to activate the whole EOC and ESF-system.
• The development of crisis scenarios entails fleshing out standard operating procedures for all ESF groups and EOC in three specific types of crises that St Maarten is highly vulnerable to: earthquakes, tsunamis and floods.
• The organisation of national crisis exercises to support the institutionalisation of operations and procedures across the crisis escalation structure and in various scenarios.
• Roles and processes of regional actors in crisis management are mapped through interviews with stakeholders. This entails an assessment of, for instance, what the responsibilities of the Dutch Caribbean islands are in assisting each other during a crisis (including the French Saint Martin), the role of the Kingdom, how regional crisis management networks can assist and how regional OCTs can coordinate with each other.
• Recommendations on coordination procedures between regional actors will be developed to render coordination smoother and more predictable.
• A high-level conference for OCTs, regional networks and the Kingdom on regional complementarity and coordination in crisis management will be organised.