Your Final Paper in the class will involve analyzing any of the problems, challenges, and lessons regarding federal-state cooperation and intergovernmental cooperation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated not only the city of New Orleans but also many of the Gulf States.

Review Case Study 5 in American Intergovernmental Relations: A Fragmented Federal Polity, “System Failure: The Response to Hurricane Katrina.”

After reviewing the Case Study, submit a three-page paper prep that contains the following information:

Topic: Identify any aspect of the response to Hurricane Katrina of interest to you. You must consider political, economic, or administrative elements of the federal and state responses to Hurricane Katrina. For example, you could focus on the evacuation of stranded New Orleans residents; the provision of emergency food and medical equipment in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane; coordinating and implementing temporary housing (e.g., FEMA trailers) to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina; economic assistance provided to cities, towns, and villages along the Gulf Coast; the establishment of law and order in the city of New Orleans.
Thesis: Develop your thesis statement. This will become the point or perspective you will argue or prove in the paper. Please see the Ashford-approved handbook, or The Writing Center, for information on how to develop a solid thesis. A draft of your thesis should be included for feedback from the instructor.
Annotated Bibliography: For this paper you should conduct research in peer-reviewed journals or other journals that are considered to have reliable information (do not rely solely on sources from the secular press, e.g., Time, Newsweek, although you may include these resources in your paper). In addition to the textbook, you need at least three articles from professional scholarly journals and not popular Internet sites (if you do find something on the World Wide Web, it must be authored and/or be a reliable source). In these journals, the research and information is either reviewed by an editorial team (such as for the Harvard Business Review) or a group of peers (such as in many journals you find through the Ashford University Library).

The purpose of the Annotated Bibliography is to assist you in developing research analysis skills including: critical thinking, writing, and literature research skills. The Annotated Bibliography should include the following information for each source:

Name of the article, including the complete bibliographic citation, using APA format.
Summary/abstract of the article – called an annotation. It is sometimes helpful to ask yourself the following questions in synthesizing the information:
Who wrote the article? (Author(s))
What was done in the article? (For example, an experimental study investigating the interaction of short term memory and attention)
How was the study done?
What were the findings? (Identify the major results of the study)
Contributions? (New findings, applications, etc.)

Submit your three-page paper (not including title and reference pages). Your paper must be formatted according to APA style as outlined in the approved APA style guide and must cite at least three scholarly sources in addition to the textbook.