Abstract
Hokitika is a rural community on the remote West Coast of New Zealand. The South Island’s mountain landscape has been created by tectonic interactions between the Australian and Pacific plates. The Alpine Fault lies west of the Southern Alps, and presents the largest seismic hazard for the South Island. Recent research indicates there is an 75% likelihood that the fault will rupture in the next 50 years, and an 82% likelihood a future earthquake would be at least a Mw 8 (Howarth et al., 2021). An earthquake of this magnitude would have devastating impacts on the communities of the West Coast for decades. All over the world there are communities like Hokitika in locations exposed to multi-hazard risks. Each community is unique in terms of local knowledge, culture, resources, capacities, and social networks, which they must draw on to prepare for, respond to and recover from major disruption and disaster. Resilient communities use their unique combination of resources and capacities to survive a disaster and thrive after. Resilience is particularly challenging to conceptualise over the long-term, when coincident and compounding hazard events can significantly challenge local community resilience efforts.
Understanding community resilience to disasters has been the focus of research over several decades. The emBRACE Framework is one conceptual model that presents community resilience as a combination of learning, resources, capacities, and action (Kruse et al., 2017). Community resilience is highly contextual, and any tools and frameworks to understand community resilience must be tested in different contexts. Participatory scenario approaches are valuable tools to address complex problems in a specific context. In community resilience research, participatory scenario approaches can incorporate multiple perspectives, opinions, and knowledges; encourage community involvement; build a sense of ownership of community-led resilience, and provides insights into complex context-specific community processes and relationships.
This research explores community resilience in Hokitika using a participatory scenario-based approach. Community members took part in a series of workshops to identify existing resources and capacities in the community, and co-design hazard and impact maps of a Mw 8 Alpine Fault earthquake. Participants collaboratively problem-solved to envision hypothetical resources and capacities that could be drawn on during the response and recovery phases. Based on the empirical evidence of the participatory scenario approach, this thesis makes three key arguments. First, by using a facilitated, participatory method, community members were able to apply their local knowledge to map a range of post-earthquake secondary and cascading hazards; community resources and capacities; and environmental, social, infrastructure, services, economic impacts on the Hokitika community. Second, Hokitika’s strength lies in its existing social and place-based resources and capacities, including the community networks (bonding) and relationships with key agencies and institutions (bridging). This strong foundation enabled research participants to reflect and take the next steps towards developing a grassroots community resilience strategy. Third, the participatory scenario approach facilitated social learning, which enabled awareness of the hazardscape and understanding of community strengths, resources, capacities, and vulnerabilities. The participatory scenario approach also enabled collective efficacy, feelings of empowerment, and a sense of community agency. These outcomes, values, and benefits can be applied toward mobilising ongoing resilience efforts and motivating future actions for community-led resilience in Hokitika, providing clear examples of bottom-up approaches that are being encouraged by New Zealand’s National Disaster Resilience Strategy (2019).
In light of the evidence from Hokitika, this thesis offers a fresh perspective of the emBRACE Framework and suggests several modifications. ‘Community-led resilience’ rather than ‘community resilience’ in the framework emphasises the value and benefits of a bottom-up approach to resilience that requires grassroots action led by the community. Modifications that reflect the collaborative nature of community-led resilience include changing the three domains of Learning, Resources and Capacities, and Action, to Social Learning, Place-based Resources and Capacities, and Collaborative Action, respectively. The top-down language of social and civil protection was replaced to reflect a grassroots, action-oriented approach. The empirical evidence demonstrates that resilience is complemented by concepts of vulnerability, wellbeing, and sustainability, as well as collective efficacy, agency, and empowerment. The adapted emBRACE Framework heuristic will support communities, disaster risk reduction practitioners, and policymakers to operationalise community-led resilience across Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.