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Mobilising for Resilience: From
Government to Governance
Robert L. Bach
Resilient communities adapt through creating innovative
approaches to collective governance, seising unexpected opportunities
to decide for themselves how to respond, organising to work with
government agencies in new ways, and accepting both the promise and
responsibility of joint decision-making.
Throughout much of the world, national leaders have
realised that in preparing for, responding to, and recovering
from disasters, government agencies and programmes
cannot do it alone. Local communities are increasingly
recognised as a critical partner in their nations’ resilience.
In this changing world, the challenge for
governments is to learn and design ways to best support
these local activities, especially in situations when the
government is not in control. Top-down managerial and
even logistics frameworks fail to mobilise and incorporate
the knowledge, access, resources, coordination, and
commitment of the broadest sectors of local communities.
A new whole-of-community approach is called for, but
governments with their very different organisational shapes
and authorities do not yet seem to know how to work as
supporters of local communities rather than as authorities,
directors and agenda-setters over subordinate entities and
clients.
The Multinational Resilience Policy Group
In 2009, a group of senior policy leaders from
several countries organised themselves into an informal
working group to examine this central transformational
issue. They decided to examine real life practices of
communities (acting in vastly different national contexts)
in the face of various natural and manmade hazards. The
central question involved a “how to” inquiry, seeking first
to understand the value of community engagement and
empowerment, and then increasingly to identify a range of
potential governance arrangements and experiences that
successfully support local community resilience.
This article highlights a few issues explored in this
continuing policy leadership discussion. They are selected
out of an expanding array of case stories constructed
locally by a combination of practitioners, researchers, and
community members who have survived disastrous events
of both large and modest scale. Common themes that
influence community resilience have emerged from these
policy leaders’ engagement with local communities in over
ten countries. These include:
• the nature of communities
• state-civil society relationships
• social capital and social trust-leadership
• meaningful exchange.
The group has selected a dozen of these case
stories to assemble into an edited volume. For purposes
here, the focus is primarily on governance activities that
help illuminate how public decisions are made before,
during and after crisis events - that is, on “state and civil
society relations”. 1 How does government work to build
the relationships and institutions that enable and strengthen
the capability and capacity of local communities to resist
disasters, respond effectively, and recover to levels of wellbeing
above those that existed before the emergency?
Partnering with the ‘right’ groups
One of the most difficult challenges for government leaders,
especially those from national departments and agencies,
is to understand community complexities throughout the
cycle of emergency planning, preparedness, response and
recovery. The perceived natural partners for government
are often the established community institutions that have
developed to provide both non-emergency and emergency
services to local residents. Governments are comfortable
with these organisations because they have administered
government programmes and funds before, and there is
a presumption that their legacy attests to familiarity and
1 The case stories mentioned in this article are fully presented
in the Policy Group’s forthcoming edited volume. The authors of the case
stories have presented them to the Policy Group at various conferences or
provided draft versions of chapters to be included in the volume. The author
of the present article is solely responsible for the interpretation of these
stories presented here. His views do not necessarily represent those of the
authors of the final versions of each case story. Contact with the authors of
each case story before the volume is published may be arranged through this
author at rbach20010@aol.com.
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