Learning from disaster inquiries and other reporting: How top-down responses erode community recovery

Abstract

Disasters do not happen in a vacuum. Instead, they compound upon the inequities already present in every environment in which humans exist. We can no longer neatly separate environmental issues from social justice issues, with the stark recognition that people already socially and economically marginalised bear the greater burden of disasters, and therefore carry the greater impacts of climate change. Just as recognising that the social determinants of health has been a revelation in effectively striving to improve the health outcomes for a range of populations, the social determinants of disaster recovery are also key.

As scientists and international bodies repeatedly tell us, climate change is occurring now. Climate change brings us extreme weather events, leading to more floods, bushfires and other devastating experiences with increased frequency. ¹ Australia, due to its location on the planet, is particularly prone to extreme weather events, as we have all either witnessed, or experienced, over recent years. ² Studies pertaining to disaster response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness around the world are many. This is, however, a fragmented field, bound up within the vagaries and distinct shortcomings of academia and short-term political agendas.

Government inquiries reveal distressed or dissatisfied communities post-disaster

Over the last five years, thousands of personal submissions provided to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements (Bushfires Royal Commission), ³ the 2022 NSW Flood Inquiry, ⁴ the Select Committee on the Response to Major Flooding Across NSW in 2022, ⁵ and the Select Committee on Australia's Disaster Resilience, ⁶ have highlighted that many community members are angry and disappointed at the way government and other agencies have responded during and after disasters. Many of the individual submissions emphasised that governments and agencies need to learn more from the people with knowledge of their local areas and lived experience of surviving recent disasters, as well as from those living in geographical areas likely to experience such events in the future. The government reports recognised, to varying degrees, and through a raft of findings, commentary and recommendations, that every disaster will require a response centred around the lives of those directly impacted. ⁷

Needing a different approach to disaster response and recovery

Disasters, as we know them, are only disasters when a hazard impacts upon a vulnerable population. ⁸ For example, a cyclone is not always a disaster if all structures are built to cyclone-standard building codes. Floods are not a disaster if people are not residing in known or anticipated flood plains. Bushfires have less impact if warning systems are adequate and if priority is given to the primacy of life. In the voluminous government disaster reporting, including that referred to above, it is now broadly recognised that the language of ‘unprecedented’ or ‘unpredictable’ events is deceptive and disingenuous in the face of the unequivocal realities of climate change which is fuelling these more frequent and intense environmental hazards. This government reporting also highlights that we can no longer neatly separate environmental issues from social justice issues, with the stark recognition that people already socially and economically marginalised bear the greater burden of disasters, and therefore carry the greater impacts of climate change. Our deeply uneven geographies highlight how our multilayered systems (including economic, social and environmental systems) must now strive for the achievement of climate and disaster justice. ⁹

It is widely recognised that many people do not have a choice in where they live; for example, in some regions, affordable or social housing may be predominately located in flood zones, farmers need to live on or near the land, and children bear the risks that their parents assume (voluntarily or not) for them. The financial and physical ability to ‘disaster proof’ one’s home is also highly variable. The course of life events and the intersectional power differentials of those who live through disasters greatly impacts upon their experiences of disaster recovery. ¹⁰ Disasters do not happen in a vacuum; instead, they compound upon the inequities and challenges already present in every environment in which humans exist. The individual submissions to the government inquiries, as noted above, identify that we need to build upon our interconnectedness by recognising local dynamics and leveraging the strengths of formal and informal community networks, to appropriately and equitably resource communities to improve disaster response in the future. Emphasis must be continually placed on acknowledging that we live within a society, not within an economy. Individualised capitalistic mechanisms of insurance are maladapted for this era of the Anthropocene, where insurance companies have inadvertently found themselves at the coalface of climate change. Instead, we require collective solidarity and the guarantee of adequate financial support in the face of climate-fuelled disaster. ¹¹ That the dividends for shareholders of corporatised insurance companies potentially take precedence over the communal care requirements of communities recovering from climate change-induced disasters, illustrates how processes of current disaster support need to be challenged and organised differently. ¹² Just as recognising that the social determinants of health have been a revelation in effectively striving to improve the health outcomes for a range of populations, the social determinants of disaster recovery, including that of community cohesion, family and individual resources (in a range of forms), are also key.

Paternalistic and individualised deficit-based approaches, which have infused government discourse and welfare service provision over recent decades, have also informed military-style forms of disaster response. Militaristic disaster response, sometimes followed by ill-fitting recovery mechanisms, is frequently met by local communities with unease, or even fear. Such top-down arrangements are often not imbued with local knowledge, including vital First Nations knowledges that are critical to survival and effective processes of recovery. ¹³ Furthermore, the neo-liberal agenda of striving for so-called ‘resilience’, in which individual responsibility and self-sufficiency is frequently seen as the pinnacle of disaster recovery doctrine, needs to be dramatically flipped where instead resources and power must be urgently redistributed to communities to help develop local adaptive capacity in light of our disaster-filled futures. ¹⁴

This era of the Anthropocene, which has grown from our colonial, extractive and fossil-fuelled capitalistic ways, must now shift power and resources back to local communities, to value relationships and connection, and to strengths and human rights-based approaches, to enable us, with solidarity, to survive the extreme events that will inevitably come. ¹⁵ The volumes of individual submissions provided to inform these government inquiries tell us that embracing community dialogue, nurturing shared and dynamic understanding of local knowledges, and adopting an ethos of relationality, reciprocity and humility, is essential to changing the form, shape and ultimately the lived experience of disaster response and survival into the future. In the Bushfires Royal Commission, many people who contributed about disaster response recognised that locally led responses to disasters should be a ‘foundational principle’ and ‘one of the strengths of the disaster management system’. ¹⁶

What should happen next?

Despite this prolific government reporting, including more than 240 formal inquiries and reviews into disasters across Australia since 1927, ¹⁷ Royal Commissions and other public inquiries have significant inherent limitations. Not everyone impacted by disaster has the resources, ability or inclination to make a submission. Furthermore, inquiries are set up on an ad hoc basis, are political and reactive in nature, the submissions are received within short timeframes, and the inquiry team usually dissolves soon after the reporting is completed. Institutional memory about the reporting process is then lost, effective immediately. Those responsible for researching and writing the reports go on to other projects or appointments, and those charged within government agencies for the implementation of recommendations are subject to political whims and orders. It should also be remembered, of course, that these recommendations are never binding. Oversight agencies such as the Productivity Commission, Auditors General (both state, territory and Commonwealth level), and the Commonwealth Ombudsman have broad jurisdictions but limited resources, so commonly do not have capacity to permanently track an agenda of recommendations, and their commentary and findings are also never binding. Glaring examples of stagnation in the implementation of recommendations arising from other inquiries or Royal Commissions include the Bringing them Home Report ¹⁸ and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. ¹⁹ Care must be taken to ensure that government reporting and inquiries after disasters are not a form of political performance art with recommendations long forgotten or unimplemented, as has happened with devastating consequences in these two landmark reports. ²⁰ Care also needs to be taken, however, to ensure that report recommendations are not blindly applied without a detailed understanding of legal specificity or of the local context; ‘caution is required against applying recommendations in a wholesale manner to another jurisdictions’. ²¹

Human rights-based approaches and mechanisms, for example, as recently utilised by the trailblazing ‘Torres Strait 8’, ²² and the privileging of Indigenous knowledges, ²³ need to be central to climate change and disaster research and practice. Human rights frameworks are effective normative tools which can hold governments to account for disaster management. ²⁴ Experiences of disaster recovery need to be understood within the multiple crises and inequities already entrenched within society and communities, to ensure that no artificial or arbitrary timeline is drawn segregating the complex realities of people’s lives. ²⁵

Communities want support, but the views of those in senior government or agency roles connected to disaster recovery may not accord with those directly impacted by disaster, and this needs to be understood and acknowledged by those with power. ²⁶ Community-based organisations are consistently underfunded, and the paid and unpaid staff who work within them, and their invaluable expertise, can be rendered invisible in times of crisis. ²⁷ The relative under recognition of long-term community-embedded social workers, who have a wide-ranging knowledge and skill base relevant to disaster management, is one component of this broader issue. ²⁸ Disaster governance arrangements, such as Local Emergency Management Committees, must be mandated to include community representatives on a permanent basis, including Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations. ²⁹ The lived experiences of those who have survived disasters across Australia need to continue to provide a robust and nuanced evidence base to shape disaster response and recovery in the future. Each community is unique. Long-term embedded processes about disaster need to be better resourced and further developed, with government agencies involved in authentic and deep listening to community members, especially learning from those quieter or more isolated people not normally involved in such participatory arrangements.