Implementing disaster resilience policy in the Australian federation

Abstract

Australia adopted the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience in 2011. This officially set it on a path to change the attitudes and behaviours of all sectors of society to share responsibility for disaster risks. This would require a shift away from the traditional emphasis on disaster relief and recovery toward prevention, preparation and planning and risk mitigation. Eight years later, disaster resilience policy continues to be implemented at all levels of government as well as influencing resilience-based approaches in the Not-for-Profit and business sectors. Much progress has been made in disaster resilience research, especially in the area of measurement, including the development of indicators that can potentially inform evaluation of the effectiveness of disaster resilience policy. However, there is shortage of research and a lack of awareness about the significance of policy implementation and governance for achieving successful policy outcomes. This thesis seeks to address this gap and investigates whether the implementation of disaster resilience policy in Australia reflects good practice and how current practice is shaped by the characteristics of the Australian Federal (multi-level) system of government. The methodology involves three parallel linked avenues of inquiry that includes the development of a Provisional Disaster Resilience Policy Implementation Framework (the Provisional Framework) to guide implementation, the application of the Provisional Framework to a number of case studies of implementation to identify principles and practices relevant to multi-level governance systems that will enhance disaster resilience, and the evaluation of the Provisional Framework to incorporate these findings. A key research outcome is the Disaster Resilience Policy Implementation Framework that confirms the inclusion of the Policy Domains of Social Capital, Community Competence, Economic Development, Information and Communication, with the addition of a fifth and complementary Policy Domain, Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity, is an organising principle that is closely associated with federalism and states that 'that any particular task should be decentralized to the lowest level of governance with the capacity to conduct it satisfactorily' (Marshall, G.R., 2008, 'Nesting, subsidiarity, and community-based environmental governance beyond the local scale'. International Journal of the Commons, 2(1) p.80). This has implications for practice that have fundamental regard to the operation of disaster resilience within a system consisting of component parts that must work together to synergise disaster resilience effort. For this system to work effectively activities must be coordinated using effective feedback mechanisms and facilitated by open and shared access to information, devolved to the appropriate level with approaches that nurture capacity, and with roles and responsibilities that are negotiated and clearly defined through an authentic process of stakeholder engagement.