RAPID: Operationalizing the Capabilities Approach in the Context of Disaster Resilience: Measuring the Social Burden of Infrastructure Disruptions

This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project assesses the impacts of power outages and associated infrastructure disruptions (e.g., water and transportation) on households by conducting a residential survey in Texas of people impacted by the February 2021 Winter Storm. During the storm, millions of households without power and water struggled to meet their basic needs.

Cooking food, accessing clean water, and staying warm proved difficult without electricity and water. Focusing on these interrupted household services and the additional effort necessary to complete important household tasks enables research to understand how critical infrastructure facilitates the achievement of basic household needs. Moreover, through the examination of the additional ‘costs’ (e.g., extra time and money spent) required to meet these needs and maintain household capabilities during disruptions, the project contributes to developing a metric that captures the social burden of infrastructure disruptions.

This metric of the social impacts of infrastructure disruptions can inform infrastructure planning and investment decisions by capturing currently unmeasured consequences of infrastructure failure.

This research seeks to advance the Capabilities Approach (CA) framework for understanding human development and well-being by investigating the social impacts of infrastructure disruptions on households. The primary objective is to empirically examine the impacts of the recent power outages (and associated infrastructure disruptions) in Texas on household basic capabilities (i.e., being healthy and feeling safe).

The research team conducts a representative, outage-wide survey of Texan households to identify the type and intensity of capability losses experienced, and examines the role of prior outage experience in mediating impacts. The event in Texas is particularly distinct because a significant portion of the population impacted has not experienced significant outages in recent memory.

By comparing the responses of people with varying levels of prior outage experience, this research elucidates the role of experience in mediating outage impacts, and enables the researchers to more accurately measure the true burden of disruptions on households caught off-guard by Winter Storm Uri. This research goes beyond prior work by obtaining granular data on the links between critical infrastructure services and basic capabilities by analyzing the impacts of power outages as they cause cascading infrastructure system disruptions (i.e., water, food, etc.).

The research maps the linkages between the disruption of household infrastructure services (i.e., lighting, refrigeration) and the disruption of day-to-day household activities critical for maintaining basic needs (i.e., keeping warm, eating) that may limit the achievement of critical capabilities and functions important for human well-being (i.e., being healthy and felling safe). This work supports a novel and augmented Capabilities Approach framework that can be used to understand the social impacts of infrastructure disruptions on households as well as the ways in which households adapt to meet basic needs.

Second, the data collected are used to develop a metric that quantifies the social burden of infrastructure disruptions on households, which is estimated according to the extra time and costs required of households to fulfill basic needs during infrastructure outages.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.