Integrating Recovery within a Resilience Framework: Empirical Insights and Policy Implications from Regional Australia

Abstract

Within Australia's federal system, responsibility for preventing, preparing for, responding to and recovering from natural disasters is shared between the three tiers of government. Intergovernmental policy and funding arrangements are premised on shared responsibility and aim to foster individual, business and community resilience. These arrangements underpin Australia's international reputation for effectiveness in its management of natural disasters. The capacity of the diverse networks that comprise the disaster management system to coordinate and deliver in the preparedness and response phases of a disaster, and to provide relief in the immediate aftermath, has been developed over time and tested and refined through the experience of frequent, severe disaster events over recent decades. Less well developed is the system's ability to support economic recovery in disaster-affected communities over the longer term. This paper presents case studies of regional communities affected by two of Australia's most expensive and deadly natural disasters-the 2009 Victorian bushfires and the cyclones and floods that struck the state of Queensland in 2010-2011. It highlights significant gaps in policy and funding arrangements to support recovery and offers lessons for aligning recovery within a resilience framework.

A review of themes in disaster resilience literature and international practice since 2012

“…Lee, Vargo, and Seville (2013) note that community resilience and organizational resilience are closely interlinked: communities cannot remain resilient without wellfunctioning and resilient organizations, including in the government and private sectors. This is supported by research in rural and regional Australia which highlights the centrality of business recovery to community resilience following a disaster (Drennan, McGowan, and Tiernan 2016). Integrating research into organizational resilience while also assessing community resilience through the DROP model could provide a blended approach where both levels are connected and assessed (Boin and van Eeten 2013).…”

“…It also makes a difference whether resilience is considered from single-event or multi-event disaster perspective as this impacts on the projected recovery period within which the "bouncing back" and "building back better" is supposed to occur (Drennan, McGowan, and Tiernan 2016;Zobel and Khansa 2014).…”

Disaster risk reduction, community resilience, and policy effectiveness: the case of the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program in the United States

“…More specifically, the authors of previous studies in this field have underscored the importance of performing mitigation projects during the recovery process, thereby closing the loop of the disaster cycle (Cutter et al, 2008; Godschalk, 2003; Innocenti and Albrito, 2011; Tierney, 2013; Twigg, 2015). Disaster mitigation includes any actions taken to reduce or eliminate the long‐term risks posed by hazards to property and human life before a disaster occurs (Godschalk et al, 1999), such as retrofitting structures, enacting new building codes, creating new land use plans, avoiding new development in vulnerable areas, and educating citizens on disaster preparedness systems (Maskrey, 2011; Drennan, McGowan, and Tiernan, 2016).…”

Approaches to state flood recovery funding in Visegrad Group Countries

“…Similarly, in Australia, since 2007, the principle of 'betterments' has been incorporated into government-funded disaster reliefi.e. if a state redevelops damaged public infrastructure to a more resilient standard, it will gain extra resources from the federal budget (Drennan et al, 2016). In the United States, the recent focus has been on federally supported programmes for voluntary property acquisition (such as the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program), through which owners of severely damaged properties are bought out from floodplains (Tate, Strong, Kraus, & Xiong, 2016).…”

“…Recovery is among the key activities in flood risk management (FRM); it comes after the immediate threat passes, a focus on reconstruction takes place and the affected area attempts to return to 'normality' (Medd et al, 2015). While the importance of recovery for future damage reduction used to be underestimated and recovery was considered only a temporary limited period of the so-called disaster cycle (Drennan, McGowan, & Tiernan, 2016), recent studies have increasingly acknowledged that it has a much greater potential to reduce vulnerability (Medd et al, 2015;Moatty & Vinet, 2016). A postdisaster situation opens a 'window of opportunity' for more transformative changes in complex systems (Brundiers & Hallie, 2018;Thomalla et al, 2018).…”