Sharing Responsibility in Australian Disaster Management Final Report for the Sharing Responsibility Project

SHARING RESPONSIBILITY IN AUSTRALIAN DISASTER MANAGEMENT FINAL REPORT FOR THE SHARING RESPONSIBILITY PROJECT Blythe McLennan and John Handmer RMIT University © BUSHFIRE CRC LTD 2014 © Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre January 2014. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the copyright owner, except under the conditions permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments. Publisher: Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, East Melbourne, Victoria Cover: Left - Blythe McLennan presenting at the 2012 Bushfire CRC and AFAC conference. Centre – Project workshop in action. Right – John Handmer presenting at the 2013 Bushfire CRC and AFAC conference. All photos by the Bushfire CRC. “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.” Burke, 1935, cited in Klein, J. T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: history, theory, and practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp.182. ________________ “By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems.” Rittel, Horst W. J., & Webber, Melvin M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169. 3 Table of Contents i. Executive summary .................................................................................................................................................... 5 ii. End user statement .................................................................................................................................................... 9 iii. Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................................. 11 iv. List of acronyms ....................................................................................................................................................... 12 1 The wicked problem of Shared Responsibility in Australian disaster management ................................................ 13 2 Conceptual background and project design ............................................................................................................. 17 3 Framing challenges for sharing responsibility in research (Stage 1 concept review) .............................................. 35 4 Engaging stakeholders about sharing responsibility (Stage 2 stakeholder engagement) ........................................ 62 5 Mechanisms for sharing responsibility (Stage 3 policy review) ............................................................................... 65 6 Windows on responsibility-sharing challenges (Stage 4 case study, VBRC public submissions) .............................. 86 7 Visions of sharing responsibility for disaster resilience (Stage 4/5 workshop, Melbourne) .................................. 132 8 Sharing responsibility for implementing the NSDR (Stage 4/5 workshop, Sydney) ............................................... 169 9 Bringing it all together ............................................................................................................................................ 210 10 Appendices ............................................................................................................................................................. 226 11 References .............................................................................................................................................................. 232 4 i. Executive summary The Sharing responsibility project sought to open up a process of critical and reflective examination of the widely supported principle of Shared Responsibility in Australian disaster management with a focus on its meaning, significance and challenges for the way that governments and citizens work together to manage disaster risk. The ultimate aim of the project was to support stakeholders of Australian disaster management to make decisions about how to pursue a vision of Shared Responsibility. Background The current, and widely supported, focus on the need for Shared Responsibility in Australian disaster management is in large part a legacy left by the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission (VBRC) (Teague et al. 2010). However, COAG’s National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (NSDR) gave a principle of Shared Responsibility even greater policy traction by firmly placing it as a central pillar of a “whole-of-nation, resilience-based approach to disaster management” (COAG 2011, p. ii). However, neither the VBRC nor the NSDR, nor any subsequent developments arising from them, have clearly defined what Shared Responsibility actually entails. In particular, they say little about what exactly needs to change in the current roles and relationships between government and non-government actors in order to put it into practice. Internationally, sharing responsibility between the State and citizens, or government and non- government actors, is recognised in political and governance research as a core dilemma across a wide range of risk-related policy sectors in a number of countries. This dilemma is connected to a very fundamental governance challenge faced by modern democratic political systems today: the changing nature of relationships between government and citizens in the face of dynamic and complex social, economic, environmental, political and technological conditions. Because of this, political theorists and political actors alike increasingly argue that there is a wide scale need for a “new balancing of responsibilities between different actors and social spheres: government, industry, individual citizens, political organizations and the institutions of civil society” (Sevenhuijsen 2000, p. 7). While this international context may at first seem too broad and high level to be directly relevant to current developments in Australian disaster management, this is certainly not the case. Indeed, the focus on community resilience and Shared Responsibility in Australian disaster policy is a particular expression of widespread trends in modern policy responses to these broad, fundamental socio-political dynamics. Yet the connection of widespread political and governance trends to policy discourses on resilience and responsibility remains largely unexamined in Australian disaster research. The project The Sharing responsibility project began with a strong awareness that before decisions can be made about how to pursue Shared Responsibility, the question of “what is wrong and what needs fixing” (Schön and Rein 1994, p. 24) needs to be answered. Importantly, this is as much a process of framing – of selecting from amongst “the various different ways to define what the problem “really” is” (Birkland 2004, p.343) – as it is about recognising that an objective policy problem exists “out there” somewhere that needs addressing (Howlett et al. 2009, p. 93). The Sharing Responsibility project was designed to expose and examine how responsibility-sharing challenges in Australian disaster management are framed at different levels. 5 Stage 1 (the ‘concept review’) used a structured review to examine ways that “what is wrong and what needs fixing” with responsibility-sharing between government and non-government actors are conceptually framed in risk management research. Stage 2 (‘stakeholder engagement’) was an on-going focus that sought to assist stakeholders to reconsider the problems and potential solutions for Shared Responsibility by ‘seeing’ them in new ways. Stage 3 (the ‘policy review’) involved a review of the types of mechanisms that have been used to shape how responsibility is shared between government and non-government stakeholders across a range of risk management contexts. Stage 4 (‘case studies’) and Stage 5 (‘synthesis workshops’) were combined to examine responsibility-sharing issues encountered in Australian disaster management in a way that was sensitive to the way different stakeholders frame these issues. The first case examined was the way challenges were reflected in public submissions to the VBRC. Two major stakeholder engagement workshops were also held to engage a wide range of stakeholders in public conversation about their perspectives on “what is wrong and what needs fixing” with Shared Responsibility. What we have learned Collectively, the findings from this project provide answers to two fundamental, underlying questions about Shared Responsibility that disaster management stakeholders are most likely to seek answers to from this project: what is Shared Responsibility and how do we do it? The Shared Responsibility discourse is articulating a new social contract for disaster management but half of the contract terms are missing. At a broad, societal level, calls for a “new focus on shared responsibility” and a “resilience-based approach” are calls for a new social contract for disaster management compared to the recent past. The idea of a social contract is a metaphor for the balance of rights and responsibilities between the State and its citizens (e.g. government and communities) that is accepted in society – formally and informally – as the legitimating basis for a system of governance. By recognising the discourse on Shared Responsibility and disaster resilience as an articulation of a new social contract we can see that one half of the contract is missing in the discourse: the rights and benefits that citizens would receive. The need to include a rights-based discourse

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