Risk,resilience and response-able practice in Australia’s changing bushfire landscapes

Abstract

This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of ‘shared responsibility’ for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia. Since the state-wide Black Saturday fires of 2009, we contend, first, the State’s decreasing ability to protect its citizens has shifted the responsibility for adapting to uncertainty to individuals, and second, this responsibility has been translated into compliance approaches to disaster risk management. We develop the concept of two distinct imaginaries at play: the reactive and the relational life. Policy discourse invokes a reactive life, a normative resilience maintaining the status quo, rather than a potentially transformative relational process enabling citizens to be ‘response-able’. Facing uncertainties, government legitimacy hinges on increasing citizen safety, with decentralised community resilience programs intended to manage and reduce disaster risk by emphasising shared responsibility. For citizens, however, ‘shared responsibility’ reveals an increasing tension in relation to the risk and uncertainty associated with life on the newly designated ‘fire-prone’ periphery, and within expectations of government. We conclude that the emphasis on responsibility as the work to be done in community-based resilience programs demands a more nuanced set of expectations that reflect citizens’ relational life as a starting place for rethinking safety and security.

Keywords

Disaster risk community resilience shared responsibility fire landscapes reactive and relational life

Introduction

The Black Saturday wildfires (‘bushfires’ in Australia) that swept across Victoria in February 2009 constituted ‘… one of Australia’s worst natural disasters’ (Victorian Royal Commission (VBRC), 2010: 1). Following a 10-day heatwave with temperatures of 40+°C, strong winds fanned ‘316 grass, scrub or forest fires’ that changed directions rapidly (VBRC, 2010). In total, 173 people died during the fires, most of them defending properties or caught in their cars in evacuation attempts. The shock of the fires’ range and toll of lives led to the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission (VBRC), which examined the conditions leading to the disaster and the subsequent response. The VBRC’s findings highlighted that the context for the fires, while historically almost unprecedented, had nonetheless been expected. Catastrophic events such as Black Saturday were predicted to recur with increasingly severe consequences. Considering that, in Victoria, four million hectares of forests burned in a series of wildfires from 2003 to 2014 – the same extent that burned in the previous 50 years (Fairman et al., 2017); and noting the 19 million hectares that burned in the calamitous 2019/2020 Australian fire season (Filkov et al., 2020), these predictions continue to resonate.

These enormous physical realities pressure steady-state government ambitions. In this article, we explore how the right to rule is associated with assurances about providing a safe society, and government being seen to manage these increasingly unmanageable conditions. As Hu (2018) reflects, disaster and liberal governance mechanisms embed a constant, uncertain present and an anticipatory future into the core of policy. This is accomplished through reinforcing the competence of government’s ‘signature institutions and the procedures of liberal rule’ to strategically manage threats and demonstrate capacity (111). We argue the privatisation of risk in programs of shared responsibility requires governance through community, which requires orchestrating community life (Rose, 1999: 475) to ensure compliance. This is a problem for citizens and the State.

The rationale underpinning this intent can be traced in the evolution of government fire protection policy, historically centred on saving lives and assets. Over the last two decades, aligning with the Federal government’s continuing incorporation of neo-liberal social policy in its provision of health and education, similar policies have surfaced in disaster management. The promotion of programs emphasising the devolution of responsibility for self has shifted fire risk to citizens, requiring individuals, rather than society, to ‘own’ their risk. Citizens must turn inwards, away from expectations of an overall societal responsibility, and they must also meet government’s expectations for compliance. Post-Black Saturday, ‘shared responsibility’ represents this tacit contract. Shared responsibility requires citizen participation in the Emergency Management (EM) agencies’ community resilience programs, providing evidence of a community response to disaster risk in fire landscapes, and as affirmations of compliance. Individuals must navigate what shared responsibility means in practice, as community becomes the object and the target (Rose, 1999: 475) of on-ground activities.

But in exploring the expectations between citizens and governments that underpins the enactment of shared responsibility, we argue that a particular formulation of community is required to achieve government’s aims: one that gives priority to the State’s interests. Analysing the post-Black Saturday 2009 community-centric fire policy, we encounter the confusing conceptualisations of identity, self and community and their ‘testing’ in the unforgiving realities of fire. We first critically analyse how these tensions emerge in the EM community resilience fire programs. We contribute to the sociological critique of resilience, extending the critical resilience literature by re-examining the philosophy and sociology of communitarianism, arguing that these contribute to the underlying responsibility narratives we encounter in our fieldwork. Second, we pursue the hegemonic structures and practices required to keep these differing versions of shared responsibility operating. To do this, we engage a genealogical perspective (but not a Foucauldian method), to distinguish the multiple State–citizen relationships required to meet State–citizen expectations. We differentiate reactive and relational life in these narratives. Briefly, reactive life reflects conventional EM expectations of an individual citizen’s readiness to share responsibility. Reactive life focuses on citizens reducing their risk and complying in response to government directives. Together, responsibility and compliance are considered building blocks to community resilience. Reactive life appears logical, hierarchical and ordered. Relational life assumes community is core to emergency response, and citizens may confront standardised expectations from centralised management, re-negotiating these through multiple lenses as relationships that emerge locally, and construct various understandings of community resilience. These relationships focus on everyday circumstances and community-led agency. Their activities tend to embody arguments associated with a common good and a mutually derived sense of responsibility that can encompass humans and non-humans. Relational life can be viewed as flexible, sometimes pragmatic and to outsiders may appear disordered or uncertain. Social complexity is starkly underlined when government imposes standardised ways of operating. We argue that this tension, which recognises both government’s attempt at orchestrating communities, and government’s subsequent inability to support diverse emergent processes, underpins the confusion of meanings managers and citizens alike encounter, when participating in actions associated with shared responsibility, community and resilience.

These observations and our analysis reference case studies undertaken over the course of a four-year qualitative research project (2011–2014) and our subsequent reports to government. These are based on 60+ interviews and a number of workshops with community representatives and EM state employees , each of which illustrates different aspects of the uncertainty encountered in the wake of Black Saturday. Two sites are referred to here. The first site, which we call ‘Forestville’ to protect our respondents’ anonymity, was directly impacted by the Black Saturday fires in 2009. When interviews were underway in 2012–2013, the communities were still in disarray and struggled with the impacts of collective trauma. The second site, the ‘Racecourse’, was also in an area burned in 2009 and threatened again in 2014. The paper reflects continued interrogation of EM documents post-2014 in relation to responsibility and community resilience programs. Responding to Noxolo et al.’s (2012: 420) argument that responsibility is frequently theorised at a meta-level rather than a set of practices, we examined the ‘responsibility work’ (420) – the actions that ensued as fire response agency officers and citizens interpreted fire policy and community resilience programs. We found that these practices effectively define and redefine shared responsibility on-ground.

This finding prompts a recalibration of responsibility. We argue that the state imposes government aspirations rather than responding to or understanding how community forms and operates. This government version of resilience and community evolving in practice in the countryside emphasises central requirements for state-prescribed safety standards and control. We conclude that resilience governance in the countryside is not about managing complexity but rather managing citizens’ expectations of government, and at the same time creating strategies and practices for government that require evidence of citizen compliance.

Community responsibility and resilience in Australian Emergency Management

We begin by exploring the ambiguous use of and contested definitions involved in the discourses of community, responsibility and community resilience in EM. By locating responsibility and resilience within community, government leans on well-established neo-conservative and neo-liberal economic sentiments of communitarianism. To this end, we distinguish philosophical communitarianism from its sociological deployment (Prideaux, 2002) and how its political deployment renegotiates the social contract. This provides the context for our characterisation of relational life and – its potential opposite – reactive life, and we demonstrate how these tropes help explain the interaction and entanglement of community, community resilience and responsibility in disaster readiness and response discourses.

The VBRC (2010) confronted the questions of who was responsible for the safety and resilience of communities, and what resilience means in rural and regional fire landscapes and on the urban periphery. The public debate quickly turned to the fact that many of those who lived in the fire-affected townships had experienced socio-economic disadvantage and lack of services, as well as dispersal and fragmentation of ‘community’, resulting from almost 30 years of local area amalgamations, under-investment in rural and regional infrastructure and services, and increasingly dynamic social and biophysical changes. As a consequence of the VBRC recommendations, new organisational structures and EM institutions emerged and have been positioned in strategically unified government agency partnerships. These recommendations and organisational changes embed the phrase ‘shared responsibility’ (Lukasiewicz et al., 2017). This is evident in the following excerpt from a community meeting, quoted in the Bushfire Royal Commission Implementation Monitor Report in 2012, the focus on individual responsibility for personal safety is repeatedly reinforced. This meeting was led by EM agencies in the region of the case study, three years after Black Saturday.

Are you ready to act if a bushfire threatened ...? Your safety is your responsibility during a bushfire and it is important to be prepared so that you can act immediately if a fire front descends upon the bushfire prone ... area. (State of Victoria, 2012: 42)

The designation of ‘bushfire prone’ asserts risk and the imperative of responsibility for fire safety on communities whose previous sense of place is by contrast, likely to be one of living in a scenic bush landscape. Evans and Reid (2014: 6–7) describe the demand that citizens ‘be ready to act’, as recognition of the difference between resistance to adverse things, and so be prepared for fire; and resilience, which is accepting they will happen and being able to act to prevent or respond to fire. Resilience in disaster risk management includes three major conceptualisations. These are engineered resilience (frequently described as ‘bouncing back’ or maintaining the existing status quo), social–ecological system resilience (described as about change and adaptation) and social–psychological resilience (focused on individual well-being and frequently associated with building skills and capacity to act) (Chandler, 2014; Grove, 2014; Walker and Cooper, 2011; Walker and Salt, 2006).

In Victoria, government has defined resilience as: ‘… the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems to survive, adapt and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience’ (Strategic Action Plan (SAP), State of Victoria, 2017a: 21).

This SAP quote epitomises the definitional interplay in the government use of resilience. Chandler (2014) suggests that resilience is the governance of complexity unfolding in response to dynamic, systemic social–ecological (SES) processes that are subject to non-linear emergence. SES resilience thinking is conceptualised as recognising uncertainty and emergence, with resilience as a process, rather than an endpoint (Walker and Salt, 2006). SES resilience assumes that adaptation is possible and can lead to transformation of self and society. Such a transformation may come as a result of multiple shocks to the existing system effecting societal or ecological change. It can be accidental or deliberate in terms of actively transitioning to more desirable ways of operating. In disaster management however, and as articulated in the SAP, dominance is given to resilience definitions enabling human prosperity through maintaining stability in the face of variable conditions (Wenger, 2017: 1). Adaptation through transformation is generally considered institutionally too radical. Maintaining a stable state (resisting change) while accommodating fluctuating conditions (1) is considered preferable.

The SAP definition of resilience emphasises a continual process of decentred, managed adaptation, mostly external to government. Government participation is required to direct the safeguarding of citizens and also to monitor reaction to disturbance, as: ‘[r]esilience is then a response to this past event, while processes of adaptation, reorganization, or memorialization are performed with the intention to establish a sense of normality, security or at least a sense of having dealt with the disruption’ (Dunn Cavelty et al., 2015: 9). It is here that we begin to see how the complex weaving of the three resilience concepts echoes sentiments of previous social-welfare domains while attempting to align these with policies of neo-liberalisation and neo-conservativism. All use a connection to community as the site for action. Indeed, as Evans and Reid (2014: 39) indicate, in a disastrous world, the attention shifts from government action to citizen response, and an acceptance of a need for citizens’ ‘…continual adaptation and productive change’.

Citizen expectations of government in relation to safety, community resilience and responsibility, viscerally surface in the context of fire. In their study of enactments of disaster risk and response, Paschen and Beilin (2015, 2016) observe deeply emotional responses that elicit various and shifting understandings of these mutual expectations. Reid (2012) states that it becomes a necessity for resilient subjects to constantly adjust to demands rather than change their conditions. The result is a normative resilience imperative (Garrett, 2015: 12–13) that emphasises the ‘agentive coping individual’: the citizen who takes self-responsibility. Resilience, in these circumstances, is about individuals adapting to ensure the stability of the existing system. As Welsh (2014) summarises:

… versions of resilience are being mobilised to facilitate archetypal governmental technologies of neoliberalism; government at a distance, technologies of responsibilisation, and practices of subjectification that produce suitably prudent autonomous and entrepreneurial subjects in a world of naturalised uncertainty and crisis. (16)

This focus directs attention away from society’s structural issues such as existing and newly generated social and environmental injustices (Pasternak and Dafnos, 2018). It may also discount significant physical changes (Grove, 2014) and emphasise individual duty and action, rather than improving social justice or inclusive relations as the basis of community resilience (MacKinnon and Derikson, 2013). Further, as Welsh (2014) notes, resilience in this view reinforces mantras and processes that formulate self-reliance and responsibility as apolitical benefits administered through decentralised governance. But as Garrett (2015: 18) notes, continuing devolution of responsibility alongside reduced organisational budgets and the ongoing effects of 30 years of austerity programs mean local citizens are least able to respond to more demands. Government distances itself from the action required of individuals and in doing so, from acknowledging the who, what and how of their relationships and places. Government strategies champion individual responsibility, imagining normative citizens, located in place-less communities. This confidence or neglect locates those who are to be responsible on the periphery of decision-making and suggests that power has shifted to them. Further, such evocations of community conflate philosophical and sociological understandings of communitarianism because of political demands for shared responsibility to be core to community resilience.

America’s influential Amitai Etzioni’s 1980s version of sociological communitarianism describes atomistic humans, who are aspirational individuals motivated by societal opportunities that generate feelings of obligation and responsibility (Prideaux, 2002: 86):

… we must try to avoid relying on the state to maintain social order, which can be achieved more humanely and at less cost by the voluntary observance of those values … the more people generally agree with one another about what is to be done and encourage one another to live up to these agreements, the smaller the role that coercive authority will play and the more civil the community. (Etzioni, 1993: 44)

Etzioni’s instrumentalist individuals act out of moral suasion, rather than being required to do so by law. Social welfare is not a societal right. Rather, rights are linked to responsibilities that originate in work and family life (Hale, 2004: 109). Cooper (2017: 22, 107, 110) argues Etzioni’s vision of family and his version of communitarianism discriminate against the poor, and black Americans, and Rose (1999: 476) notes the loss of the social contract that was based on society’s determinations. It is replaced by a politically objectified community and individualised morality. This ‘moral contract’ is consequently, between individuals, for perceived individual benefit (Krizan, 1997: 155, 161). In this context, resilience strategies reinforce existing individualised norms, as Walker and Cooper (2011) suggest. This is a depiction of a shared responsibility framework that includes the soft paternalism of the State, and an expectation that people’s identity is normalised, and can be found in an individual’s home: their ‘asset’ (Beilin and Reid, 2015). Individuals turn inward because their resilience depends on reinforcing purposeful ties to specific moral collectives. These networks of accountability endow the individual with moral standing depending on individual action.

Rose and Lentzos (2017: 18) suggest resilience can be imagined positively, as an interface between state and citizen action, in which individuals, unable to depend on the State, or recognising the state’s limited ability to assist, can mobilise within the ‘imagined territory … of community’ (Rose and Lentzos, 2017). There is a suggestion, in this articulation of resilience, that it exists as a neutral substance to be harnessed to individual or shared causes. But in our experience, admonitions of or for community resilience are used by the State to convey responsibility as a duty, in a simplified and targeted engagement, for a purposeful outcome wherein, as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1995) laments, there is ‘enlightened self-interest’ (192) but not a shared immediate common good, or Bauman’s (2001: 150) community ‘woven from sharing and mutual care … ’.

Taylor’s discussion of communitarianism depicts society as arising from and maintaining democratic activities through a shared common good that emerges as a creation of community, resisting the totality of ‘what it is right to do’, and responding instead to ‘what it is good to be [and] by ‘defining the content of obligation … ’ (Taylor, 1989: 3) through ‘ … moral concern’ that respects ‘the life, integrity, and well-being, even flourishing, of others’ (4). These strengthen the ability of citizens to recognise that there are some things important to them, beyond the self (508). Rose and Lentzos (2017) also propose that resilience as a community generated relationship could produce a moral collective in which the state and the citizen can invest ideas about resilience as an antidote to vulnerability (9), affirming governance in communities (14) rather than the hidden commands of the centre, because in community, the ‘ … individual is imagined as a moral subject enmeshed in bonds of affinity with others in localized ties to a specific moral collectivity’ (Rose and Lentzos, 2017: 18). Taylor reflects the philosophical communitarianism (Hale, 2004), that underpins Rose’s insertion of the moral subject and a moral collectivity. But these are not neutral, even if they are existentially embedded in society, because there is no unencumbered self; and they require close relations which may resemble social covenants rather than contracts (Krizan, 1997: 156). Further, as we describe in the ‘Responsibility-Work’: Case Notes section, the resilience of such relational communities depends on their ability to turn outwards (from self), to act in response to context and strengthen and create ongoing place-based relationships.

Therefore, we distinguish the importance of relationships as core to politicising community as the targeted territory to be governed and use two imaginaries: the reactive and the relational life. We do this to address the complexity and cross-purposes in language and action, lurking within expectations of shared responsibility, community and resilience. The reactive life is between the state and the individual citizen in the manner of sociological communitarianism. It aligns with neo-liberal and neo-conservative goals (Cooper, 2017: 21), and epitomises Taylor’s concerns that it reinforces a mobile society of ‘revocable associations’ where community is a means to an end, entrenching an ‘atomistic outlook’ (1985: 93–94). Here, the responsible citizen has ‘an obligation to contribute’ to the resilience of the status quo, but here the community represents ‘ … collections of individuals to obtain benefits through common action they could not secure individually. The action is collective but the point of it remains individual’ (Taylor, 1995: 188). We suggest the SAP sums it up:

[E]veryone has the capability to contribute to emergency management. Building safer and more resilient communities is the shared responsibility of all Victorians. We each have an obligation to contribute to improving the preparedness, capability and resilience of all communities. (SAP, State of Victoria, 2017a: 29)

The relational life, by contrast, respects the potential of a moral collective that Rose (1996) imagines and that follows philosophical communitarian principles; and, we argue, exists, and is most commonly practised among citizens in their everyday ‘face-to-face’ relationships with others (Lévinas, 1969; Young, 2011). Taylor describes civil society as grounded in such relationships, and coalescing in diverse ‘communities of communities’ (Taylor, 1985 in Krizan, 1997: 163) in which what is required is a sense of shared fate ‘where the sharing itself is of value’ (Taylor, 1995: 192). Here, we understand, resilience would be generated through commitment to each other’s welfare, and responsibility is not a top-down imposition (Hale, 2004: 100).

Based on these contrasting visions of individual and community life in the increasingly fire-prone periphery, we see the need to distinguish how communities experience Welsh’s (2014: 16) ‘government at a distance’ and ‘technologies of responsibilisation’, alongside the place-based ‘affinities’ and ‘localised ties’ that Rose (1996) and Rose and Lentzos (2017) affirmed in the potential of the resilience and responsibility discourses. We consider how ‘government at a distance’ acts to orchestrate its relationship to community by standardising community actions. The conflict between reactive and relational life emphasises tensions at play when safety becomes a duty and ceases to be a citizen’s right, and where agencies face the everyday disconnects between programs and people. Reactive life emphasises that the complexity of fire can be managed through community constituted as individuals responding to an event. Relational life accentuates the process involved and this means the preparation for fire and the recovery post-fire ideally would be part of continuous community engagement – even as we note an interaction between reactive and relational characteristics, as citizens construct the everyday. As the technologies of resilience governance are geared to simplifying citizen expectations of government, they require individuals have the capacity to undertake local preparedness with minimal expectations of a central response (Aldunce et al., 2014). Reid (2012) argues this generates ‘logistical life’ wherein planning and risk metrics are meant to provide stability, and Grove (2014: 246) notes, logistical life reinforces ‘ … the imperative to protect liberal order from surprise’. Logistical life penetrates reactive and relational living. Logistical-risk metrics allow citizens and EM agency staff to monitor compliance through meeting attendance, hectares of land cleared and vegetation management. By contrast, the language that government brings to the resilience project is relational, as in programs such as the Community Resilience Framework (CRF) (State of Victoria, 2017b), that affirm ‘communities are at the centre of everything we do’ (7) though not necessarily generated by communities. It is the shared vision within the EM sector to ‘build safer and more resilient communities’ (14) but what their adaptation to community resilience comprises, remains undefined. Wenger (2017: 3) indicates that, in practice, resilience is easily adopted into operational disaster management and is repeatedly ‘superimposed upon pre-existing concepts and operational frameworks’; as in the CRF, where the intention is that: ‘Governance and institutional frameworks concerning the community are joined up and focussed … When services, products and policies are developed, adaptation and community resilience is paramount’ (State of Victoria, 2017b: 31); building on the VBRC’s (2010) recommendations for increased participation: ‘ … that everyone—the State, municipal councils, individuals, household members and the broader community—must accept greater responsibility for bushfire safety in the future and that many of these responsibilities are shared’ (6).

Rogers (2013) depicts such language as ‘resilience as governmentality’, where the suggestion of joint participation or citizen-led initiatives in community suggests relational possibilities; but central processes and technology improvements, reflect ‘pastoral power’ (323) and ‘joined up’ outcomes, focused on central technologies and policies that disempower the same citizens’ decision-making while emphasising their self-responsibility for risk (Rogers, 2013: 322).

It is not clear to citizens how to act in response to a centralised approach that requires bottom-up compliance. It does not allow space for Taylor’s communitarian ambition for ordinary life to be defined from within its social or communal context (Hale, 2004: 93). Nor is there a clear articulation of public involvement in the whole disaster cycle, and risk education does not equal community engagement (Rogers, 2013: 329). The VBRC enrolment of the whole of society in the disaster risk and resilience project of shared responsibility speaks to participation and responsibility as a duty to the State, and this is also reinforced in the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011) that followed on from the VBRC: ‘[T]he fundamental change [in strategy] is that achieving increased disaster resilience is not solely the domain of emergency management agencies; rather, it is a shared responsibility across the whole of society’ (3).

‘Shared responsibility’ in the disaster resilience discourse therefore targets ‘ … and sanction[s] just some forms of action and empowerment’ (Grove, 2014: 249). Welsh (2014: 20) argues that naturalising uncertainty and risk limits the role of government to that of ‘enabling, shaping and supporting’ communities. Communities in turn are expected to react, to be hopeful and perceive the possibilities for citizen action, even while transforming social responsibility to an individualised care of self (Evans and Reid, 2014), and conforming to rather than resisting normative directions and support (Reid, 2012).

Therefore, different interpretations of resilience are not easily distinguished in the EM literature and, consequently, ‘community resilience’ is found to combine government expectation of reactive life while appropriating the language of relational life. Guarantees of safety and security that citizens might request from the state present as unattainable because of the dynamic uncertainties within the local scale that reinforce ‘government at a distance’. For example, there is increasing evidence of vulnerability to the physical effect of fires and climate, not least for the elderly and disadvantaged. Difference in capacity, experience and socio-economic realities is ignored or transformed by the state into apparently manageable risks for individuals. This diminishes the role that citizens associate with the state’s social responsibility and instead naturalises the conditions of vulnerability as part of individual self-care (Evans and Reid, 2014: 65). Self-care is inward looking and strategic about engagement with community. In the reactive life, vulnerability and preparations made for adaptation to adversity diminish the structural conditions that underpin existing systems and inequalities, because the state ‘disperse(s) uncertainty and responsibility for being prepared and response-able throughout the system’ (Welsh, 2014: 21). Meanwhile, as Pellizzoni (2004: 543) indicates, the state – having re-dimensioned its role through its governance networks – reinforces ‘ … the enhancement of a change in the relations of responsibility’ (542). But the individual is still expected to engage with the echoes of the social contract that government intends in its mobilising of ‘community’. It is, as Connolly (1991: 96) notes, important the state reconstitute responsibility so if it ‘ … cannot be located in the individual, it must be localisable in the collectivity’ (105); that the aim of a purposeful community is to provide benefit to the individual and to the state, through participation, signalling compliance in EM directives and programs.

In the next section, we consider how responsibility emerges in situ post 2009 and the 2014 fires.

‘Responsibility-work’: Case notes

Informal place of safety

After Black Saturday, the VBRC commented on the failure of the pre-2009 ‘stay or go’ policy, stating:

… The State has accepted that the policy options of leaving early or staying to defend [houses against bushfire] do not fully cover the need for contingency plans, but it still appears reluctant to implement alternatives, arguing that the availability of a suite of options could discourage some people from leaving early. The Commission is concerned that the State’s reluctance is reflected in the slow progress with community refuges and bushfire shelters. It simply does not face the reality that the earlier binary policy approach did not help many people who, for various reasons, did not find either option acceptable in their circumstances. (VBRC, 2010: 5)

The February 2014 fire that threatened an urban periphery area of Victoria presented the kind of dilemma referred to by the VBRC. More than 70 residents went to a local racecourse that was not a designated Neighbourhood Safer Place (NSP) (Young, 2015: 4). The decision to stay and set up an informal place of safety (IPS) – in 2018 called a Bushfire Place of Last Resort – was not as a ‘last resort’ but ‘a considered and networked response to the situation’ (4). Recollecting that some if not all of these IPS participants had undergone the 2009 fires, their non-compliance with government expectations exposes the complexity underpinning their anticipated (by government) compliance. In this situation, they were to follow the new norm of preparing and leaving early or if caught out by the fire front, going to the nearest Community Refuge or NSP. Instead, the residents argued they had to protect their animals and, since horses and dogs were not welcome in NSP refuges, citizen-owners needed to be where these animals could be safely attended.

The Victorian government agencies were reluctant to support NSPs post-Black Saturday. They argued that if citizens were sharing responsibility, they would prepare and leave. If they had understood the messaging, they would accept that it was part of their social contract with the state. They were to interpret what to do as: fires are the norm, risk is inherent in the countryside and safety must be found elsewhere.

I think it’s very, very important that local communities right across the State accept the fact that they are living in a high bushfire risk area and they cannot expect that the authorities will always provide them with sufficient warnings. It’s impossible to have a big red fire truck in front of everybody’s houses. (E., community resident, W-ville, 2012–2013)

As a public land manager said:

So you guys need to do your bit and take care of the residual risk and we all need to work together because we, the public land manager, can in no way give any guarantees whatsoever and we, the public land manager, cannot protect you from bushfire risk. We’re no longer in the business of protecting people, we can’t yet offer any guarantees, no protection, no guarantees. Bushfire is basically going to get you but what we can do is reduce the risk of that bushfire getting you [by planned burns] but we can never ever eliminate it. (Agency Bob, 2012–2013: 7)

The Racetrack IPS participants used social media and talk-back radio to communicate their location, their food and water needs, and, later, their critique that the EM authorities were not being responsive to animal welfare. They were self-organised and responsive to their animals with a duty-of-care that, while ‘last minute’ in one version, was also flexible, practical and innovative in another.

In the aftermath of the 2014 fires, the Racecourse IPS was officially dismissed as a possible NPS, despite the continuing animal welfare argument. In discussions with mid-level managers in some branches of the fire response agencies, the Racecourse IPS citizen activism was described to the authors ‘as anarchy’. A local government enquiry in 2014 found the Racecourse site failed a Country Fire Authority (CFA) radiant heat assessment (Mitchell Shire Council, 2014). Undaunted, the local residents insisted they be part of official assessments and that mitigation of buildings and the surrounding area might be undertaken to effect compliance with the CFA standards.

The complexity of the situation for EM responders is not ignored here. During the fire threat, the Racecourse site drew away police and EM responders from other NSP and possibly the more distant Community Refuge site. NSP and IPS sites are considered high risk during a bushfire. As an EM consultant and community resilience facilitator explained in our interviews: ‘warning systems and shelter systems might create dependencies and expectations that are harmful for resilience’ (Agency John, 2012–2013: 24–25) and overall, contribute to ‘ … destroying resilience’ and ‘ … offer no real safety’ (26). He continues: ‘ … if we’re going to have them [places of shelter], they have to be much safer. They create more uncertainty and more people deciding at the last minute whether “to stay or go”’ (27).

John’s expert knowledge tells him that there is nowhere safe in a fire front, and that is the message for local residents. Bob said it earlier: if you stay, you must accept the risk of a bad outcome. Still, as a community member asks: ‘if they say “leave early” does this effectively absolve the community and government of responsibility and all the responsibility lies with the individual?’ (Helen, 2012–2013: 7).

Forestville: Adaptation through adversity

In ‘Forestville’, we consider the framing of citizens who were unable to act as empowered or response-able citizens in their encounters with the Black Saturday fires or the subsequent recovery services. The shared responsibility policies that the interviewees discuss here are a consequence of programs developed after Black Saturday. But these policies and programs were referenced by the agency responders as they discussed their ideas about what constitutes an adaptive community (Paschen et al., 2015). In this context, an adaptive community is defined as surviving in adverse conditions and learning from adversity. This resonates with Walker and Salt’s (2006) description of resilience as the ability to bounce back after a shock through incorporating change. Adaptation as a consequence of adversity is described by another EM consultant:

… the qualities of resilience are more pronounced in ‘small generally isolated communities’ that ‘are very effective at managing their own stuff’ because of ‘small numbers’ and ‘small number of community interests or networks and nearly everyone is covered by those’, and because they are tougher ‘living in ‘Mountainville’, it’s not cushy and easy [ … ]you still have to be a bit of a pioneer. (Agency John, 2012–2013: 6–8)

John’s comments engage with the idea that adversity can be a catalyst for adaptation and community resilience. In disaster risk and resilience, Wamsler and Brink (2014) distinguish the short-term targeted responses to adversity as coping; with adaptation described as longer-term and a more systemic response to events. Bonanno (2004) emphasises that at a personal level, psycho-social resilience after a shock is common but that this resilience is distinct from the recovery process. Mountainville is perceived as networked and cohesive and so able to cope with shock. In SES resilience thinking, community also becomes more vulnerable to repeat shocks over time (Walker and Salt, 2006), or other kinds of traumatic situations like wars (Seery et al., 2010). This recognises adversities can co-occur and aggregate, and while some lifetime adversity might assist with better long-term outcomes, individuals with histories of adversity or no history of adversity may be less resilient. Therefore, response to adversity is not normative.

Forestville was severely impacted by the 2009 fires with more than 40 people dying and 538 houses destroyed (Country Fire Authority, 2017). John compares Mountainville and Forestville. He positions Mountainville as responsive and adaptive as a consequence of their constitutional familiarity with adversity and backgrounds these citizens as an independent, harmonious, adaptive community. Whereas, as John said,

… People in ‘Forestville’ … They were probably of the mindset that government needed to fix everything for them. I think they kind of had a victim mindset [ … ] ‘we’ve had this horrible thing and we need to be helped. Some of them were even of the welfare model … (Agency John, 2012–2013: 9–10)

As noted, the ability to adapt may depend on the level of exposure to adversity (Seery et al., 2010). John wonders if post-fire, there were expectations for ‘the welfare model’, equated with waiting for State support, and he thinks that shaped the Forestville residents’ fire response in general. Forestville includes people who recently moved from the city as part of a socio-economic shift: they frequently cannot afford to live in the city so they move into these forested areas with likely little understanding of the land management involved and the relative remoteness from services. Others live there because it is possible to commute to the city while living in the ‘bush’. Forestville residents include retirees and young families. Being response-able here would depend on personal abilities, governance structures and physical infrastructure (for example, Forestville is accessible only by a winding, narrow road) and the relationships between all of these and with other citizens in this place. It is not possible to imagine a template that would fit the emotional and physical needs of such a diverse collection of residents, and it is possible to imagine them confronting multiple adverse situations.

Earlier in the interview, John had identified the capacity to cope with adversity as part of being able to share responsibility. But in the landscape of Forestville, there is no over-arching connection between individuals and place. Responsibility through self-reliance and self-help cannot be passed on (Noxolo et al., 2012: 421–422) because of the asymmetries of power. Interestingly, the Victorian EM staff assume individuals in community to have more power than EM agencies in effecting this action:

Basically, to be absolutely blunt, the community need to get their shit together and I think that if those that really understand bushfire risk, and we are here to help people understand bushfire risk, start to work together and put pressure on their neighbours who aren’t doing fuel reduction burning, then pressure from the community is much more powerful than pressure from the public service. (Agency Bob, 2012–2013)

Bob assumes a homogeneous community, where being response-able is a given. His comment indicates that responsibility for effecting fire safety can be passed on, and that individuals can work together as a coherent community.

In the discussion of Forestville and Mountainville, the relationship between adversity and adaptation depends on variables that reflect dynamic events and a diversity of people and places. While coping reflects short-term and specific practices that may be part of response, adaptive, longer-term and systemic change (Wamsler and Brink, 2014) is not a linear progression arising from community experience. Importantly, the various situations that citizens of Forestville experienced in 2009 and in relation to government intervention over the years following these fires indicate just how tenuous notions of responsibility are when they are theorised at a meta-level (as Bob and John do), rather than as Noxolo et al. (2012) note, within a series of local practices. It is not possible to evaluate responsible action even though John and Bob, as state employees, may ascribe it to Forestville citizens because of assumptions around fire preparedness or locale. The State could not pass on responsibility to act in ascribed ways at the IPS or in Forestville.

Recalibrating responsibility

We reflect here on how the IPS and Forestville case analyses assist with recalibrating the ways in which responsibility and community resilience are entangled through the entwining of reactive and relational life. The IPS case shows complex and practical construction of relational life: moral and ethical obligation, and interdependency with place; but also that the IPS ‘community’ continued to develop post-fire as it collaborated with other agencies to create shelter. Forestville residents appear disconnected from place and each other in reactive life. Through the discourse on adaptation and adversity, we see a state failure to take responsibility for the vulnerability of citizens who are isolated, less able to overcome structural inequalities or other kinds of disadvantage. This suggests that reactive life may not be a choice for some, but rather the consequence of the loss of societal care, social welfare and interest. We conclude this section by returning to the emergent theme of care and the expression of relational life.

As Bauman suggested, the contradictions that occur in stabilising the meaning of community, as a consequence of government ‘disengagement [as] a new strategy of power and domination’ (2001: 125), are significant. The ways in which community resilience is deployed also emphasises the complexity of activities for EM – one of which is its’ internal organisational resilience, which depends on individuals enacting the delegation of state authority (see Rogers, 2013: 323); outwardly, its external work is in facilitating the transfer of responsibility for community resilience to individuals in ‘government through community’ (Rose, 1999: 176 his emphasis). This is not a straightforward disposition, but one in which the two types of contracts co-exist. There is the social contract between the state and the individual, as in Etzioni’s neo-conservative rendering of community, and the language – if not always the action – of the social covenant between the state as generated in the collective, as described in Taylor’s philosophy of communitarianism. These are confusingly deployed in the same space as in the National Disasters Resilience Strategy where it asserts:

Governments’ desire to help communities in need, and pressure to help those affected may be creating unrealistic expectations and unsustainable dependencies. Should this continue, it will undermine community capability and confidence. Therefore, communities need to be empowered to take shared responsibility for coping with disasters. (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011: 1)

This is how EM enacts ‘technologies of responsibilisation’ (Welsh, 2014: 16), distancing decision-making and resisting community-empowered activities despite evidence of community self-organisation, as in the IPS site. Citizens are expected to share responsibility as ‘self-sustaining partners’ (Rogers, 2013: 324), that do what they are told.

What emerges from the IPS in practice is relational life, in a moral and ethical commitment among these citizens. Their moral code is the obligation they felt towards their animals and consequently to each other (Young, 2015: 22). It was not the state’s half-articulated contract (McLennan and Handmer, 2014: 6) about a diffuse responsibility to be safer elsewhere. Uncertainty was irreducible. Citizens understood that message. The unspoken, unofficial and dominant contract at the IPS was about shared responsibility between owner-families and animals. It was relational and evoked a powerful responsiveness among like-minded citizens who acted together. Butler and Athanasiou (2013) argue that responsibility as responsiveness ensures that we sustain norms that uphold regimes, until there is a sense of diminished reciprocity, at which point there is a kind of political awakening which allows a defiance of authority. Tully (2008 in Wagenaar, 2014: 239) sees informal resistance as ‘ … “acting otherwise” within the space of governance relationships’. In action, the IPS citizens acted as Connolly (1991) would suggest, that is, they created a harmonious purpose built on the pursuit of common contexts that shaped their interdependencies and shared responsibilities.

IPS was a place of resistance, as, with less positive outcomes, was Forestville.

When the Forestville citizens are required to do what Noxolo et al. (2012) describe as on-ground but externally defined responsibility work, resilience is deployed as social–psychological risk and, as this is highly individual, it also means resilience as well-being depends on individual responses (Beatson and McLennan, 2011). The state assumes that capacity and able-ness are a given. Individual citizens have only to increase their life skills to facilitate adaptation to adversity, shock or ongoing trauma. It is a normative and one-dimensional interpretation of people. Further, while this reactive set of assumptions is loosely located in a place, the relationship to place is ill-defined, except as risk. This exacerbates a passive resistance to EM command and control expectations of local responsiveness. EM associated personnel explained their interpretation of the apparent Forestville failure to be responsible for self, as possible social-welfare tendencies that fed local resistance to state-centric expertise.

We extend Taylor’s argument about the importance of the social or communal context (Hale, 2004), to the relationship to place that is implicit in fire landscape preparedness, experience and response. Relational and reactive life may correspond to the location of or dis-location from place in these sites. Bennett (2014: 669) explains how belonging in place is a moral way of being-in-the-world, and an evolving construction of everyday life. Ontological belonging built from ‘mutual obligations to care for the past and future of places and those who inhabit them’ (670), is necessarily unique, shaping ‘community’ and resilience processes. Place-based connections extend the meaning of home and the power of landscape to explain why people live where they do (Beilin and Reid, 2015; Reid et al., 2018), when they have those sorts of choices to make.

The interviews with EM associated agency staff about Forestville particularly highlighted adaptation as key to successful shared responsibility and community resilience. Grove (2018: 268–269) suggests that adaptive governance is expected to generate new institutions that mediate between complex systems and their environments. Being adaptive is understood as a core value in being responsible. In the social–ecological resilience literature, it is particularly focused on revisiting the system level relationship between humans and the non-human environment (Grove, 2018: 86). But this literature also pays attention to vulnerability, which is often understood elsewhere as the opposite of resilience. In the social–ecological resilience literature, vulnerability is sometimes described as the necessary precursor to adaptation because it may provide opportunities for innovation or creativity. Significantly, vulnerability is frequently understood as a functional issue, internal to the system – and not therefore related to structural issues effecting such system(s) (44–45). Citizens can allegedly be made responsible for their vulnerability and then for any misfortunes that ensue (Zebrowski and Sage, 2017). Importantly, adaptation may depend, as Berkes (2007) notes, on knowing the conditions that will lead to heightened vulnerability. Adger et al. (2009) attest to what is, on consideration, an affirmation of relational life: that in the context of climate change disasters, the ‘ … ability to adapt [is] determined in part by the availability of technology and the capacity for learning but fundamentally by the ethics of the treatment of vulnerable people and places within societal decision-making structures’ (350).

This provides a vector to understanding the potential agentive characteristic of shared responsibility, as Iris Marion Young (2011) conceptualised it. She described a forward sharing ethic of caring and responsiveness through relationships, and we note how in the reactive life, response is interpreted as duty and compliance, whereas in the relational life an ethic of relational care requires engagement with others and has the potential to reflect complex local understandings. Vulnerability as a social justice issue is currently invisible in the construction of community resilience. Responsiveness lays the groundwork for re-imagining what shared responsibility can mean in the narratives of community resilience.

In recognising that multiple narratives of community resilience depend on what Lévinas describes as human kinship, wherein ‘[T]he presentation of the face [of the other] … puts me in relation with being’ (1969: 212), there is alignment with philosophical communitarianism recognising that we are embedded in society. There is no unencumbered self (Krizan, 1997: 157). As we make ourselves vulnerable by responding to others, we experience at least some of their need. Responsibility for others becomes inseparable from responsibility for self (Lévinas, 1969: 214). Shared responsibility emerges in this context as actively generated from within a communal social covenant that has expectations of the state: a shared social contract.

Clearly shared responsibility is differently imagined by the state than among its citizens. The reactive life that underpins EM conceptualises shared responsibility as certain and defined, and as Liebenberg et al. (2015: 1019) argue, those that cannot be responsibilised by the state may become further marginalised. Whereas in relational life, shared responsibility resides in the face-to-face relationships among citizens and may also include relationships with non-humans and their places. Communities undoubtedly experience the interaction of reactive and relational life reinforcing the dynamic realities that do not ‘fit’ normative compliance.

Conclusion

Visiting Forestville in May 2009, the hillsides were covered in burned tree trunks. With no green canopy cover, the even age of the forest stand was visible and the lack of older trees indicated that this is a repeat fire landscape: one that had burned about 30 years earlier. Most of the people affected by the 2009 fires probably could not read that landscape. This realisation cuts to the core of the arguments in this paper because it speaks to the layers of confusion and complexity that underpin preparation and response in EM disaster risk.

Central to shared responsibility and community resilience is the relationship between government and citizens, the state’s conception of community, and the relationships that all have with fire in the landscape. These relationships are manifest in the dynamic social contract that underpins societal expectations and assumptions. The reorganisation of EM post-Black Saturday has led to a plethora of government strategies and reports aimed at clarifying who is responsible in a disaster. As a consequence, shared responsibility and community resilience initiatives have emerged with the community engagement and operational deployment of regional agency personnel targeting the skills and capability of ‘community’.

We have argued that there is significant confusion about the state’s language and its intentions in the field. The disaster risk emphasis is on neo-conservative, neo-liberal economic assumptions that promote individuals as largely responsible for their safety and shift risk away from the state. Structural injustices, the realities of remote or isolated locations and national austerity measures that have undermined regional and local council abilities to act are largely ignored in the determination to minimise risk and responsibility among agencies. Adversity is expected to trigger citizen adaptation and adaptation is meant to begin with compliance. We have argued that the state itself is caught in the paradox of needing a self-directed community, but its methods are not to empower community but to standardise expectations of individuals and deploy them to minimise the state’s risk. Citizens are essentially imaged as passively conforming to government direction, with secondary allegiances to community groups or networks.

By contrast, we argue that individuals are embedded in place and among people and that this is the foundation of the ‘morally mediated relationships’ (Noxolo et al., 2012: 421) that underpin adapting and sharing ways forward in a collective, philosophical communitarian sense that is critical to the co-construction of community resilience. Iris Marion Young (2011: 109–110) wrote that shared responsibility is when a society confronts injustices as part of political responsibility and ‘ … try to transform the necessary practices’ (112). Young’s words reinforce the IPS experience of relational life; just as her emphasis on structural injustices reminds us of the many reasons why the Forestville residents have limited opportunities to embrace any part of sociological communitarianism expectations. Their isolation as individuals with few resources limits their individual and collective response-ability.

Second, we understand the potential of community resilience that Rose and Lentzos (2017) identified as a possibility. It reflects the power of locally generated relational life: for example, EM officers are also citizens. Many first-responders are those who live in these regions and are part of the trained, highly local, volunteer fire-fighting service. The overlap of identities epitomises the complex relations within the landscape, within ecosystems and among networks that significantly reinforces relational life responses. This is philosophical communitarianism as neighbourliness and actions that generate communities of communities. These can align with the empowerment potential inherent (if not always apparent) in resilience thinking and programs. Relational life grounds and activates more effective possibilities in the communities’ reactive life, as in times of heightened risk.

Third, expectations that shared responsibility can be contained within community resilience programs rather than co-evolving as part of a social covenant, further distances the government and its ability to participate in transformative adaptive change. Because there is no homogeneous community, there cannot be a standardising of adaptation. The state vision of logistical life reinforces ‘government at a distance’ and community resilience as a management issue. The Racecourse IPS experience of adaptation as responsiveness in face-to-face situations allowed citizens to resist the state and form social covenants based on neighbourliness – relationships with human and non-human others –, and to describe their actions as sharing responsibility in response to risk and uncertainty. Consequently, for EM, operational uncertainty increased; and ‘government at a distance’ has led to adaptation at a distance – that is, citizens acting independently of government expectations. The state can choose to describe this activity as anarchy or irresponsibility. However, the legitimacy of the state and its engagement with its citizens is a series of relationships that require constant attention. The state can choose to relegate its authority to merely managing the re-actions of others or it can engage in the messy performance of building shared programs, through co-generated, shared practices, based on trust and moral as well as actual infrastructure.

We have established that being able to act, to be response-able, is complex and that there is resistance to responsibilisation at a distance. It can, as in our cases, manifest in responsiveness but not necessarily compliance.

It is not our intention to romanticise the possibilities of collective action, but rather to argue that relational collective action transcends self, even while affirming the power of the individual to act in philosophically communitarian ways. As Young (2011) also writes, the enacting of responsibility provides the opportunity to demonstrate an ethic of care, as one citizen in our study describes:

In my street I feel, you know, we’ve got some older people living that it’s not just about me—if I was leaving, I would probably be actually at the phone tree. I’d probably be ringing a couple and say, you know, do you need a lift out, what are you doing, are you staying? (Community L, E-ville, 2012–2013)

An ethic of care extends between people and place, as another citizen says:

… half the reason that I look after my property is because I’d like to avoid it being burned if possible, the other half of the reason is that I don’t want it to be a risk to everyone else’s properties. (Community K, C-ville, 2012–2013)

Out in that countryside of diversity, vulnerability and resilience, the simplistic if tacit contract with the state is wanting. A new social contract is called for in community resilience and shared responsibility programs, one that supports relational life and co-constructs its interaction with reactive and logistical life as a part of sharing responsibility. There are inter-dependent, trust-based, socially just relationships to be had with government, as in the attempts to legitimise the Racecourse IPS. There, face-to-face relationships with neighbours constituted an ethic of care that created multiple narratives at local levels, recognised diversity and frequently enabled action. Other citizens remain marginalised, not response-able rather than irresponsible, left in increasingly uncertain landscapes for the next fire.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants in the studies referenced here; and the reviewers, editors and research assistants involved.Special thanks: Amanda LoCascio, Colin Long, Rebekah Pryor, Barbara Blair.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The authors received Australian Research Council (LP110200313) funding for aspects of this research, authorship.

Ruth Beilin is Professor, Landscape and Environmental Sociology Group at the University of Melbourne, a former Director of the Office for Environmental Programs, author of more than 100 papers and publications associated with landscape, interdisciplinary thinking and learning, community and civic society and has worked and researched in Africa, Canada, EU, Sweden, the Pacific and Australia.

Jana-Axinja Paschen is a research fellow in the Rural Innovation Research Group at the University of Melbourne. She has worked with rural communities for over five years, focusing on applied research for community resilience outcomes in disaster risk and natural resource management. A systems thinker, Jana is an experienced action researcher and has facilitated collaborative research with diverse community, policy and industry stakeholders. She has published 12 academic papers and technical reports on resilience.

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