Strategies for Supporting Community Resilience Strategies for Supporting Strategies for Supporting Community Resilience Multinational Experiences Community Resilience “This collection of articles offers hope that even the most senior and accomplished leaders can learn together. In 2009, several policy officials self-organized to create an opportunity to have direct dialogue with their peers, without formality, protocol, or bureaucratic barri- ers. … From my experiences here in Christchurch, the five themes that organized this pol- icy exchange and are represented throughout this volume hit the mark. Emergency plans all too often either fail to understand or even misunderstand the nature of communities.” Lianne Dalziel – Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand Multinational Experiences “If we learn to listen to local residents, they will tell us how best to support them. Government has an essential role in resilience, but it is in finding new ways to be better partners and making it easier and more effective for residents to prepare themselves and recover together. What we have learned from our own experiences, and those of other nations, suggests that governments and citizens succeed when the whole community is involved.” W. Craig Fugate - Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency “Our risks are changing, and with them we need new resilience strategies. In our case, learning to live with water in a new way is critical. Learning how to prepare for and recover quickly to cyber attacks is equally urgent. But making sure that our citizens are the center of our strategies is the priority. The chapters in this volume identify well how priorities are changing and what can and should be done in the next decade to build and sustain community resilience.” Helena Lindberg – Director-General, Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency ”I had the pleasure of participating in the policy dialogues from which these chapters originated during a meeting in New Zealand. The focus on local community resilience and the challenges that governments face in supporting citizens to prepare for and recover from disasters is timely and conceptualized well. Case stories, drawing from interviews, local discussions, and even participant observations, serve as a useful method to convey these analytical insights to diverse audiences. The narratives invite readers to listen to local residents, which rehearse what the authors would like from senior policy leaders. The book complements the extensive scholarly work that continues to grow across the globe in search of improving our resilience to expanding risks.” Haruo Hayashi – Professor, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Japan Editor: Robert Bach isbn 978-91-86137-38-0 Multinational Resilience Policy Group Swedish Defence University Editor: Robert Bach Box 27805 Series Editor: Bengt Sundelius SE-115 93 Stockholm www.crismart.org 41 CRISMART Volume 41 Strategies for Supporting Community Resilience: Multinational Experiences Multinational Resilience Policy Group Title: Strategies for Supporting Community Resilience: Multinational Experiences © CRISMART, The Swedish Defence University © Multinational Resilience Policy Group Editor: Robert Bach ISBN: 978-91-86137-38-0 ISSN: 1650-3856 Cover image: Bilderbox/Pixtal/TT Cover design: Eva Österlund Printing House: Elanders Sverige AB, Stockholm 2015 Table of Contents Foreword Lianne Dalziel ............................................................................5 Acknowledgments Bengt Sundelius and Robert Bach ...............................................11 Chapter 1 Policy Leadership Challenges in Supporting Community Resilience Robert Bach, David Kaufman, Kathy Settle, and Mark Duckworth ...............................................................15 Chapter 2 Government Can Not Do It Alone: The UK Experience of Resilience Ian Whitehouse, Rebecca Bowers, Ralph Throp, and Kathy Settle........................................................................53 Chapter 3 The Idea of Resilience and Shared Responsibility in Australia Mark Duckworth ......................................................................83 Chapter 4 New Zealand: Renewing Communities and Local Governance Ljubica Seadon and Robert Bach .............................................119 Chapter 5 Engaging the Whole Community in the United States David Kaufman, Robert Bach, and Jorge Riquelme ...................151 Chapter 6 Living with Water: Shifting Dutch Approaches to Community Resilience Corsmas Goemans, Jose Kerstholt, Marcel Van Berlo, and Martin Van de Lindt ........................................................187 3 Chapter 7 Community Resilience in a Binational Region Jeffrey A. Friedland, Cal Gardner, and Robert L. Bach ..............213 Chapter 8 Implementing Whole-of-Society Resilience: Observations from a Case Study in Pemberton Valley Lynne Genik and Matt Godsoe ...............................................235 Chapter 9 Crisis Communication and Community Resilience: Exploring Symbolic Religious Provocations and Meaningful Exchange Eva-Karin Olsson, Erik Edling, and Eric Stern .........................263 Chapter 10 Readiness, Resilience, and Hope: The Israeli Experience Talia Levanon and David Gidron ...........................................289 Chapter 11 What Works to Support Community Resilience Robert Bach, David Kaufman and Friederike Dahns ................309 Author Biographies..................................................................341 4 Foreword Few activities are more important to effective leadership than hav- ing an opportunity to examine one’s own experiences, biases, and interests with peers. Government leaders are too often separated and isolated from the people they most need, which includes the citizens they serve and others who hold similar responsibilities. Without con- scious effort, leaders are soon overwhelmed by information and anal- yses shaped and packaged in ways that strive more for policy align- ment and bureaucratic efficiency than effective action. It is a struggle to find pathways to ground truth and inspirational moments, as well as learning about cutting edge ideas and innovations. Nowhere is this a more necessary quest than among leaders who have responsibility for and the opportunity to influence a community’s, a city’s, or a nation’s resilience in the face of accelerating climatic risks, cyber security threats, or complex, interdependent vulnerabilities. In my hometown, Christchurch, New Zealand, devastating earthquakes abruptly taught me that connecting with and learning from peers and, especially, neighbours and fellow citizens was the single most impor- tant ingredient in leading through crises. We learned, collectively, that to lead through an emergency all barriers to collaboration had to come down. In Christchurch, government officials joined with local com- munity leaders, faith-based leaders problem-solved alongside police officers, neighbours sat with neighbours, and some who had rarely participated in civic activity stepped out of their homes and beyond their private lives to spark amazing cooperative initiatives. 5 Strategies for Supporting Community Resilience: Multinational Experiences Much of this activity, however, seemed simply too late, especially among the government officials who were in charge. Most did their best, even heroically responding under extreme duress. But we had missed opportunities beforehand to learn together with the diverse communities that make up our city and prepare for what would hap- pen in a much more collaborative way – and learning to let go tradi- tional roles, trusting the emergent leaders to do the right thing. I now also fear that, after the worst of emergencies pass, leaders too easily return to their separate, isolated worlds of managing gov- ernment bureaucracy rather than learning and adapting. This collection of articles offers hope that even the most senior and accomplished leaders can learn together. In 2009, several policy officials self-organized to create an opportunity to have direct dia- logue with their peers, without formality, protocol, or bureaucratic barriers. They even insisted on having an opportunity to meet in person with disaster survivors and community residents working to prevent emergencies. The primary motivation for their exchange, as it grew to include ten countries, was a learning task: How can gov- ernment authorities support community resilience activities without overwhelming local residents and their leaders, crushing initiative and creativity, and undermining the local efforts that, more often than not, are responsible for successfully preparing, responding to and recovering from disasters? I became part of this policy dialogue not as a national senior offi- cial but as someone who lived through the Christchurch earthquakes and only subsequently became Mayor. As a local resident and leader, I heard from people I met in my work with the earthquakes that a multinational policy group was asking critical questions about com- munity preparedness, how local people spontaneously emerge to cre- ate innovative responses, and the challenges that government officials face in trying to move existing formal systems in time to help anyone. From my experiences here in Christchurch, the five themes that organized this policy exchange and are represented throughout this volume hit the mark. Emergency plans all too often either fail to understand or even misunderstand the nature of communities. In Christchurch, we learned immediately after