Book of Abstracts 2013 - Australian and New Zealand Disaster ...

Mr Mark Armstrong
Director, Full Capacity
Co Author - Mr Don Quinn, Associate, Full Capacity
Beyond recovery …………. Reconstruction as the ‘fifth phase’ of disaster management
The PPRR (Prevention Preparedness Response Recovery) model has been a widely accepted model for emergency
management planning in Australian in recent decades. Yet the political and policy legacies of recent major disaster
events suggest that PPRR is not as ‘comprehensive’ as it is often described. An analysis of practice suggests that there is
actually a distinct ‘fifth phase’, commonly called reconstruction. Cyclone Larry, The Victorian Bushfires of 2009, the
Queensland flood and weather events of 2010/11 and 2013 all saw extensive post-recovery activities undertaken by
specially formed authorities. These bodies all had roles not defined in State Disaster Management Arrangements and
they had to be integrated within the normal machinery of government to achieve their purposes. They conducted a
range of activities including coordinating NDRRA funding submissions, making recommendations for medium term
mitigation measures and coordinating the management of donations. These Authorities, whilst successful, all formed
from scratch, in the midst of crisis, without an existing legislative or conceptual framework to guide activity and
facilitate integration. This situation, understandably, resulted in missed opportunities, friction amongst participating
agencies, bureaucratic inertia and ad-hoc arrangements. These experiences suggest that there is an opportunity to
anticipate and plan for reconstruction activities as part of a truly comprehensive approach. In doing so, there is an
opportunity to bring together two groups of professionals to collaborate more: emergency planners and emergency
managers. The latter develop their own emergency operations plans, which are in the vast majority of cases focused
almost exclusively on immediate response and recovery functions following a disaster. Moreover, the discussion
between planners and emergency managers, particularly if augmented by environmental and sustainable development
perspectives, could open up new opportunities and approaches for post-disaster betterment. This paper will seek to
summarise the important common themes from the post-recovery activities in recent Australian disasters and then
provide a conceptual policy and organisational framework for a fifth, ‘reconstruction’, phase.
Ms Amara Bains
Director, Strategy & Operations, QLD Alliance for Mental Health Inc.
Co Author - Ms Joanne Durham, Lecturer, Aust Centre for Tropical and International Health
Community based organisations: developing organisational resilience to build back better
Most community disaster management plans include reference to an important role for community based organisations
(CBOs), yet there is little published information about how resilient these organisations are - an essential capability
that enables them to participate in meeting community needs during both acute and recovery phases. The advantage of
CBOs, of being community-based, is also their vulnerability, as in all likelihood they too are affected by the disaster.
While organisational resilience is often used synonymously with business continuity, for these groups working at grassroots
level, organisational resilience goes beyond business continuity. It includes the ability for an organisation to
continue its day-to-day business and meet a surge in the demand for services it may not normally provide, as well as
the ability stay connected to the community so that it remains a viable entity within the community for building
resilience. Therefore, organisational resilience in this context refers to CBO’s capacity to adapt to the needs postdisaster
and manage its own organisational transformation post-disaster in order to ‘“build back better’” and preserve
its role in building and promoting community resilience. Despite the crucial role CBOs play in all stages of the disaster
management process, there is limited understanding of how to evaluate and develop CBOs’ resilience. The purpose of
this paper is to begin to address this crucial gap in the literature. Drawing on Australian and New Zealand published
research and a comprehensive literature review followed by a qualitative analysis of the literature and the authors’
experience in Indonesia, Cambodia and south Sudan, this paper uses a systems approach to analyse CBO resilience. We