Death Becomes a Government Capacity Issue: Big Questions for Local Government Death Management

Abstract

As local governments in the U.S. are largely responsible for managing death, questions emerge about organizational capacity loses for a public service that is everywhere yet often unknown and unseen. While mass fatality events and pandemics might bring death front and center, it abounds each day in land use questions, death investigation infrastructure, public personnel and resource allocation, training, leadership, and more. In this invited commentary, we introduce the death management capacity to frame a series of big questions facing the practice of local government death management while also setting a future-looking research agenda all guided by a practitioner co-author.