Abstract
Curating a Gaze on Crisis
From August 2019 through March 2020, the Australian south-east coast was engulfed by bushfires on an ‘unprecedented’ scale. Media were quick in referring to the events as a ‘crisis’ and criticizing the inability of government to effectively respond. In particular, two feature-length documentaries have explored different aspects of the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires and their impact. Eva Orner’s Burning focuses on the policy failures of Australian federal politicians to confront climate change over the last decade, and the enormous cost of these failures for bushfire-affected communities. Justin Krook and Luke Mazzaferro’s A Fire Inside highlights especially the impact of the crisis on firefighters and emergency services, and explores themes such as volunteerism, trauma and community resilience.
In 1926, pioneering film maker John Grierson famously coined the term ‘documentary’ and defined it as an exercise in ‘creative treatment of actuality’, emphasizing its ability to challenge our perspective on reality through the artistry of film and the curation of a specific ‘gaze.’ Taken together, Burning and A Fire Inside provoke the viewer to confront the reality that climate change will cause worsening bushfires (as well as other climate events) that will test our ability to effectively plan, respond and recover.
Multimodal sources, such as these two documentaries, ‘have considerable potential to change the way organization scholars see their subject matter’ (Höllerer et al., 2019, p. 191). In this media review, we explore how these sources guide and inspire us to rethink and reinvigorate our research agenda on crisis, considering a shifting reality and accounts of the lived experience of those affected by the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires. Burning and A Fire Inside invite scholars to revisit, in particular, the suitability of institutionalized approaches to crisis planning, response and recovery. We propose three possible themes, informed by the curated gaze on the bushfires in these two documentaries, but with broader relevance to crisis research in our domain of scholarly inquiry: adjusting extant planning and governance systems, nuancing the government-led management of community recovery and rethinking practice adaptation processes through various forms of learning.
Governance Systems to Effectively Tackle a Future of Creeping and Transboundary Crises
The greatest tragedy of this terrible ‘Black Summer’ bushfire season was that we saw it coming . . . (Tim Flannery, academic, environmentalist, and conservationist, in Burning)
In the opening sequences of Burning, Tim Flannery’s voice is heard accompanying overhead images of an out-of-control bushfire. He emphasizes a confronting truth: the ‘Black Summer’ is not a singular event, but a tipping point in the ongoing climate emergency. We argue that this necessitates a reorientation of how we conceptualize events such as major bushfires moving forward. Instead of viewing them as sudden, aberrant events, we would be well served to clearly understand them as part of a ‘creeping crisis’ which evolves ‘as slumbering processes over long periods of time, with unclear beginnings and ends [. . .], suddenly manifesting as “explosions”’ (Boin, Ekengren, & Rhinard, 2020, p. 120). Creeping crises tend to foster a collective myopia with regard to emerging risks, particularly from political leaders. Burning demonstrates these dynamics through capturing the ennui of senior conservative Australian politicians, the national unwillingness to rethink our relationship with fossil fuels, and reflections from climate activists and scientists on our collective inaction. As organizational scholars, much of our attention so far has been on challenges faced in responding to the onset of ‘explosions’, such as decision-making during crises or the practices of high-reliability organizations we rely on to deal with them. The conceptualization of creeping crises invites research to shift its focus, for instance, to investigate the appropriateness of current planning and preparation practices which, as more mundane parts of the crisis cycle, often fly under our collective research radar.
We can expect to see far more severe fire seasons than we have seen in the past [. . .]. Whatever we have seen to date, this is just the start of it . . . (Bruce Buckley, meteorologist and climate analyst, in A Fire Inside)
While Burning ‘zooms out’ to illustrate the ‘creeping’ emergence of the ‘Black Summer’, A Fire Inside ‘zooms in’ to depict the challenging conditions experienced by firefighters and emphasizes the likelihood of increasingly intense and complex bushfires to come. This prompts us to ask: Do extant crisis governance systems remain fit for purpose? Climate-driven crises, such as the ‘Black Summer’, are transboundary in nature, as they increasingly cross legislative, political-administrative, functional, temporal and cultural boundaries (Ansell, Boin, & Keller, 2010). The impacts of transboundary crises manifest in several complex governance challenges. For instance, with accountability and authority in crisis typically wedded to legislative and political-administrative boundaries, transboundary crises introduce ambiguity to decision-making processes as roles and lines of authority are blurred by the need for collaboration across jurisdictions. In addition, through rapidly bringing together a network of functionally distinct actors, transboundary crises force crisis managers to navigate a tension between ensuring efficiency in crisis response and maximizing inclusivity of network participants in executing that response. Governing future transboundary crises will require research focusing on adapting collaborative governance arrangements to address these challenges. As organizational scholars, we are well placed to tackle questions such as: How can existing collaborative governance arrangements be reconfigured to streamline interfaces between (potentially) incongruent governance arrangements across jurisdictions? What governance mechanisms will enable a balance between efficiency and inclusivity in rapidly expanding response networks during transboundary crises?
The Road to Recovery: Empowering or Supporting Community?
Because you were cut off from the world, people did feel we had been abandoned. People might have a few possessions and the clothes on their back, that’s all they had . . . (Dave Allen, Cobargo publican, in A Fire Inside)
Burning and A Fire Inside offer an authentic and emotionalizing glimpse into the impact and aftermath of the fires on communities. They capture and share a diversity of experiences: feeling overwhelmed, traumatized, abandoned – and, at the same time, ‘under-used’. While Burning emphasizes the state’s duty of care in supporting communities through crises and into recovery, A Fire Inside showcases images and stories of community resilience and a desire for self-reliance and self-determination. Residents’ experiences, captured in A Fire Inside, showcase that centralized responses by government failed to draw on local knowledge and, in turn, appropriately address the ‘needs’ of community members in recovery. Comparing these sentiments reminds us of an ongoing conundrum after bushfires: What is the appropriate role of the state on the road to recovery? Is it to empower or to support the community, and how? No doubt, there are no simple answers to this question. Balancing a community’s diverse needs is a complex matter due, in part, to the contrasting institutional logics at play: a bureaucratic state logic tending toward hierarchical intervention, and a community logic in which needs and actions are negotiated and collectively decided. The aftermath of extreme crises challenges organizational scholars to investigate such complexity by unpacking the institutional, strategic and organizational forces that shape the road to recovery, and contribute to identifying robust pathways to resilience. Given that the impacts of these events will be more keenly felt in future, understanding how best to navigate such complexity, and how to effectively tailor responses so that communities feel supported and retain agency, are crucial.
The Need to Unlearn, Learn and Relearn: Adapting Bushfire Management Practice
Everything we tried to do just didn’t work – the fire was just too severe from what we were expecting and what we were capable of doing . . . (Nathan Barnden, Jellat Rural Fire Service, in A Fire Inside)
The conditions experienced by firefighters on the ground are portrayed, in A Fire Inside, as overwhelming, if not completely ‘unmanageable’. As Danner-Schröder and Sele (2024) note, adjusting and adapting bushfire management practice in response to this evolving threat has never been more essential. Learning is expected to happen after a significant crisis through public review processes. However, post-hoc inquiries and reviews do not necessarily translate into meaningful change. We therefore call on scholarly work to explore questions around learning process and practice adaptation: How do we ensure meaningful lessons are learnt? How can practice be adapted to prepare for a rapidly changing environment? And how should post-hoc review processes be changed so that they are ‘a basis for developing lessons learned from what went right as much as from what went wrong’ (Dwyer, 2021, p. 610). A starting point lies in research that foregrounds learning and adaptation processes geared toward encouraging ‘adaptive resilience’ (Leixnering & Höllerer, 2021). Adaptive resilience is underpinned by unlearning defunct practices, opening repertoires for novel practices through learning, and ensuring effective practices are identified and reinforced through relearning. Research, in partnership with practitioners, will place an emphasis on how such an approach promotes outcomes necessary to address contemporary challenges.
Concluding Remarks
Both Burning and A Fire Inside challenge viewers to confront a ‘new normal’ as the impact of bushfires (and other climate-driven events) worsen. Moving forward, we suggest that organizational scholarship could thoroughly assess the suitability of current crisis management approaches and practices. To shape such trajectory, we have proposed three promising starting points: investigating extant planning and governance systems, approaches to managing community recovery, and practice adaptation processes. In charting a path forward, we believe that there is value in looking more closely at sources such as those exemplified by Burning and A Fire Inside, in addition to more direct (multimedia) accounts from the field. As Rouleau (2024) impressively demonstrates, our discipline is able to meaningfully engage with the richness of such materials, given a growing conceptual and methodological toolbox inspired by social semiotics and multimodality (Höllerer et al., 2019).
In closing, we wish to emphasize that, just as these documentaries sparked our interest due to their curation of a specific ‘gaze’ on the Australian ‘Black Summer’, we ought to recognize the duty of organizational scholars in contributing to – if not shaping – in an agenda-setting function – the public debate around pressing societal issues. Too often, recently, this has been left to the media and, increasingly, to populist accounts in social media and beyond. We, as academics, through establishing an engaged research agenda, can contribute to such curation and, in turn, both elevate the societal impact of our work and lend scholarly rigour to the discourse around these issues.
