Community-led approaches to disaster resilience in Australia

This thesis will be investigating past and current Australian practices of disaster resilience to understand how a community-led approach to disaster resilience may be operationalised within the sector.

Disasters in Australia like this have been shown to overwhelm the institutional ‘levees’ that have been slowly constructed since colonisation and raise a much more challenging question and critique of the social contracts, expectations and societal norms that people have long known to exist between themselves and a disaster. With the greatest firebreak between society and a natural hazard being that of the institutions that ‘protect’ them, be that emergency services, agencies, local council or state and federal government. Through this there has arisen a need to understand the systemic limitations and the socio- environmental factors that exist between risk, exposure, vulnerabilities, and capacities.

This project will help to empirically understand the past and current practices of disaster resilience, identify the opportunity for change, examine the change levers that exist within the current disaster resilience system and explore how the community-led approach to disaster resilience could be operationalised.