How a risk focus in emergency management can restrict community resilience – a case study from Victoria, Australia

Abstract

The research investigated understandings of risk and resilience in emergency management (EM) policy and practice. The core findings illustrate how a complex of institutionalised socio-cultural expectations and standardised processes – that is, evidence-based response models to deal with and communicate uncertainty – influence the operationalisation of resilience in EM. We observe that a focus on disaster risk as a quantifiable product of physical hazards is an attempt to control uncertainty and leads to engineered or technology-centred response solutions. Accordingly, community resilience is principally seen as the product of risk reduction, incident response and recovery interventions. The research shows that resultant command and control management practices produce limited – and limiting – interpretations of community resilience as disaster resilience. This can restrict existing and emergent community responses to risk, and the ability to imagine and enact more systemic types of community resilience. For instance, the short-term disaster focus tends to neglect the social and institutional root causes of community vulnerability and generic risk information is detached from everyday community experience. Using wildfire in Australia as its case study, this paper discusses the social, cultural and practical challenges of operationalising social–ecological resilience in EM.