On-going community resilience from the ground up: a relational place based approach to grassroots community resilience

This paper summarises a research project that aimed to more fully understand the role of non-governmental local organisations in shaping responses to local crises, and also to investigate whether there was a case for increasing support for grassroots groups on the basis of the resilience capacities they can contribute.OverviewThe Christchurch earthquakes that occurred in September 2010 and February, June and December 2011 have wrought unprecedented devastation on the region of Canterbury. Yet amongst the disaster, hope has shone through. Communities have pulled together, supported each other and started the long process of recovery and rebuilding. Academics, community leaders and policy analysts, both locally and internationally, have looked to Christchurch to observe the effects of this disaster and the way in which Cantabrians have and will recover. Having lived in Christchurch for most of my adolescence I started this research in the hope of showing the human stories of disasters in the academic and policy realm. To do this I have focussed on the role of grassroots organisations in facilitating resilience and the role of place in shaping these processes.I approached Project Lyttelton as a possible case study for this research as they were well publicised as a grassroots group that was actively involved in immediate and on-going recovery from the earthquakes. Project Lyttelton is an organisation that focusses on building a sustainable and vibrant community in response to the issues of climate change, peak oil and consumerism. Through appreciative inquiry (searching for and telling the good stories) and hands on grassroots activities, such as a time bank, farmers market and community garden, the group has been contributing to the Lyttelton community since 2003. Due to the generous participation of members of the organisation and wider community this research was able to be undertaken in June 2012. The following information summarises the approach of the research and the results

Disasters, Risks, and Revelations: Making Sense of Our Times

Review of Steve Matthewman, Disasters, Risks, and Revelations. &nbsp

The Helminthosporium Foot-rot of Wheat, with Observations on the Morphology of Helminthosporium and on the Occurrence of Saltation in the Genus

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Beyond public meetings: Diverse forms of community led recovery following disaster

Disasters provoke a multitude of responses at different scales of society, both in the immediate aftermath and in long term recovery. The importance of public participation, consultation and citizen engagement is increasingly acknowledged and integrated into an array of sectors, including planning and governance processes following major disaster events. However, there is growing concern that some practices of participation may narrow the space for genuine democratic engagement. This builds on a wider understanding of the potential for participation to be engaged in shallow and tokenistic forms. This paper explores, through a qualitative methodology, how residents perceived participatory processes following the Canterbury earthquakes which affected the city of Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2010 and 2011. Importantly, this paper focuses on the diverse forms of participation in the recovery as discussed by residents. This contributes to a wider perspective on post-disaster recovery that recognises the diverse and informal pathways that shape the ongoing recovery of Christchurch. Subsequently, this critical yet hopeful account demonstrates how action at the local scale is integral to fostering a sense of community engagement and ownership over disaster recovery

Rethinking community resilience: Critical reflections on the last 10 years of the Ōtautahi Christchurch recovery and on-going disasters

The legacies of mechanistic and scientific approaches towards community resilience are increasingly challenged for lacking insight and nuance. They fail to understand the complexities of social organisation, community dynamics and patterns of power and politics. While generally conceptualised as the ability of a system/community to respond to, cope with and recover from a particular hazard, communities in Ōtautahi Christchurch have needed to be resilient for an extended period of time to respond to multiple (natural and human-induced) hazards. We explore how community resilience has been operationalised, resisted and re-worked in the recovery from the Canterbury earthquake sequence. We explore these themes in the context of an unfolding and compounding landscape of crises. To explore these themes, we seek to both reconceptualise and provide a critical discussion of the overly popular concept of community resilience

From hope to disappointment? Following the ‘taking place’ and ‘organisation’ of hope in ‘building back better’ from COVID-19

Rapid economic stimulus in response to COVID-19, typically based on ‘shovel-ready’ infrastructure, has opened up new political spaces of hope to ‘Build Back Better’ and transform economies. This research seeks to link the public ‘taking place’ of hope, representing the aspirations of various groups for investment or change stimulated by this fund, with the less visible ways governments ‘organise’ hope, the expert, technical processes and rationalities that help determine which hopes become realised and why. Using the Aotearoa New Zealand ‘shovel-ready’ fund as a case study, and drawing upon press releases, media, Official Information requests, and Cabinet documents, we first provide a discourse analysis of the various government and non-government hopes that became attached to this stimulus. We then trace how these became translated into project proposals, before unpacking and analysing the urgent processes developed to assist political decision makers. While crises and hope can be positioned as having significant disruptive potential, we reveal how this was stifled by the technical processes and practices of the processual world enacted at the national scale, which was given significant power. Further, although public discourses reflected a plurality of multi-scalar and temporal hopes for investment, in practice the less visible organisation privileged a much more business-as-usual approach. Consequently, any government aspirations for transformation were rendered less likely due to the processes they themselves established. Overall, we emphasise the need for those committed to reform to bring technical processes and rational practices to greater prominence in order to reveal and challenge their power

Re-imagining relationships with space, place, and property: The story of mainstreaming managed retreats in Aotearoa-New Zealand

As a nation rapidly progressing managed retreat legislation, we take a historical perspective to identify how the imaginary of retreat evolved in Aotearoa-New Zealand to become mainstream. Tracing the history along a layered reactive-passive-proactive timeline, we reveal how policy experiments and technical advocacy coalitions have advanced different imaginaries of retreat, creating new political spaces for change. We identify the importance of understanding retreat as less of a “policy” and more an attempt to unmake and remake space that has implications for justice and the permanence of land-use and property in an era of dynamic risks

Student Strike 4 Climate: Justice, emergency and citizenship

In the past 12 months, young people have been flexing their political might through the Student Strike 4 Climate (SS4C) movement. Inspired by the articulate and determined Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg and direct action by striking Australian school children in late 2018, on March 15, 2019 there were actions in over 1,700 cities involving 1.4 million people (Carrington, 2019a). The strikers issued a set of demands, largely targeted at their governments. In Aotearoa New Zealand, these demands included a comprehensive Zero Carbon Act, that local governments start acknowledging and planning for climate change now, and that all adaptation and mitigation is rooted in Te Tiriti and social and intergenerational justic

Explaining reflexive governance through discursive institutionalism: Estuarine restoration in Aotearoa New Zealand

The paper examines an instance of reflexive governance in environmental policy and planning and explains its emergence through a discursive institutional lens. Discursive institutionalist frameworks draw attention to the articulation and institutionalisation of new ideas and the way they produce the objects of governance, powerfully influencing the conceptualisation of problems and solutions, determining who is involved in governance processes and the nature of their interactions, and environmental policy outcomes. We draw on the notion of a discursive institutionalist spiral as a way of understanding the nearly 40-year evolving relationship between ideas, discourses and institutions that have shaped the planning context in an estuary restoration initiative on the east coast of the North Island, New Zealand. The case is based on the analysis of an archive of historical policy, planning and technical documents, and 25 in-depth interviews with participants representing different groups involved in a current restoration initiative. We suggest that the case represents a new degree of reflexivity by the responsible governing authority, that this can be explained by reference to the historical dynamic of discursive and institutional change, and that it indicates the benefits of the interactive and participatory formulation of goals and strategies in environmental governance and management

Shifting discourses of nature in participatory processes for environmental management

The increasing use of participatory processes in environmental governance and management has implications for the way different conceptualisations of nature and the environment are recognised within environmental decision-making. This article draws on a case study of the Ōngātoro Maketū estuary restoration initiative in Aotearoa, New Zealand, to examine how shifting discourses of nature and the environment intersect with the exercise of power to influence decision-making on the estuary. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of an archive of historical policy and planning documents, and 25 in-depth interviews with participants involved in the restoration initiative. The analysis demonstrates that despite a participatory process that often reinforced the dominant cultural paradigm and power relations, it created the space for different knowledge forms including western science and Māori knowledge to help improve the quality of decisions. We argue that well-designed participatory processes have much potential to address the growing complexity and uncertainty underpinning environmental governance and management