Bael Jordan

I am an independent researcher living in Haiku, on the island of Maui, Hawaiʻi. My doctoral research investigates why disaster governance systems consistently fail to recognise the non-human actors (watersheds, fire, land, ecosystems) that determine whether disasters are prevented or merely survived. On August 8, 2023, wildfire destroyed the town of Lahaina, twelve miles from where I now live. Within weeks, I was working in the disaster's aftermath. Within months I was serving as Data and Compliance Manager for the federally funded multi-agency recovery program: leading governance, audit-readiness, and compliance functions across a network of up to eight partner organisations under simultaneous FEMA, DHS, state, county, and funder oversight. I held that role for eighteen months. I watched the penalty-as-license problem operate in real time. A $1,000 vegetation management fine, set years before the fire, but never enforced in the Lahaina area.

Fine structures are governance choices; when those choices are shaped by the same actors whose behaviour the fine is supposed to govern, the deterrent becomes a price list. My background is organisational governance, compliance framework design, and multi-agency data systems. My MBA in Healthcare Administration (WGU, 2025) developed formal capacity in regulatory governance; eighteen months in the Maui Disaster Recovery Program applied it directly across multi-jurisdictional legal structures. Prior to that, six years managing governance for a 47-acre conservation research organisation gave me early exposure to the tensions between treating land as a managed resource and treating it as something with its own claims on governance decisions. I am currently applying to doctoral programmes at Leiden University, the University of Southern Denmark, and Lancaster University. This study is foundational data for comparative dissertation research across three disaster jurisdictions. All data will be published open access.

June 2026