Published works

 Natural disasters have always occurred regularly in Australia and governments have developed public policy responses for dealing with loss and damage resulting from disasters. In early 2011, Australian governments at all levels adopted the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (NSDR) (Commonwealth of Australia 2011). The NSDR offered a new paradigm that called on all sectors of the community to adopt resilience-based behaviours in the face of the inevitability of natural disasters. Instead of being overly dependent on government and emergency services organisations, people were encouraged to become more self-reliant and share responsibility by gaining awareness, knowledge and taking action to reduce their risks. While there is a general consensus on the types of high-level policies needed for resilience, there is less information about how to translate disaster resilience policy into action. Addressing this gap depends in large part, on appropriate implementation of government policy to foster disaster resilience, including in a multi-level system of government, like in Australia. This paper, citing a lack of guidance for resilience policy implementation, proposes a resilience policy implementation framework that could be applied by practitioners. The theoretical basis for the framework consists of four networked adaptive capacities for resilience. Other elements include actions that support the development of these capacities and federal policy mechanism. The framework is tested and refined using four case studies corresponding with the four adaptive capacities and using data collected from five resilience initiatives operating within each tier of government and in the business and not-for-profit sectors.