Published works

This briefing paper presents a proposed framework for assessing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of four broad, alternative strategies available to emergency management organisations (EMOs) for engaging with non-traditional emergency volunteers and voluntary organisations: Ignore, Resist, Accept, and Embrace. The framework explicitly requires consideration of multifaceted consequences for key stakeholders groups beyond established EMOs (e.g. communities impacted, the volunteers themselves), and across the emergency management cycle (before, during and after an event).

The briefing paper begins with a research-based context and rationale for developing the engagement framework. It then presents the proposed engagement framework itself and briefly outlines a process that will be used between July and December 2016 to test and refine the framework for use by EMOs as an applied decision support tool. The refinement process is centred on a series of interactive workshops with key stakeholder groups to test the framework in an applied setting.

The engagement framework is being developed by RMIT researchers as a component of the Bushfire and Natural Hazard’s Out of uniform: building community resilience through non-traditional emergency volunteering project (http://www.bnhcrc.com.au/research/resilient-people-infrastructure-and-institutions/248).