Published works

The resilience of a community is dependent on more than just engineering and preparation.    Government policies, institutions and governance arrangements fundamentally affect how individuals and communities prepare for, respond to and recover from natural hazard events.  Understanding relevant institutions and how they influence disaster management is essential to develop whole of government and whole of community understanding of risks and how to manage them.

This research project has shed light on policy, institutional and governance arrangements with a view to developing new approaches to shared responsibility (COAG 2011) to increase community resilience to all natural hazards.  This project will deliver:

• Evidenced based suggestions for policy, institutional and governance reforms to improve the ability of communities to actively participate in emergency risk management (Theme 1);
• Information for communities, agencies and government on the perverse incentives and hidden barriers to shared responsibility for emergency management (Theme 2); and
• Recommendations for a revised post event inquiry process to better identify lessons from past events (Theme 3).