National Policy Frameworks for Compound, Cascading and Protracted Disasters: Learning from Other Policy Sectors

Abstract

With changing settlement patterns, population growth and climate change, disasters will become more problematic in their frequency and on impacts on communities, economies and environments. It is logical, then, that there will be an increase in non-singular events, that is: compound, being concurrent or overlapping disasters; cascading, being sequential and possibly reinforcing disruptions; and those with protracted impacts, where the ‘long tail’ of consequences following disaster events is layered, more persistent and more difficult to address. These factors place severe pressure on disaster policy and emergency management arrangements, across the spectrum of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery, for governments, communities, specialist disaster organisations and increasingly for other policy sectors as the demand for ‘mainstreaming’ of disaster risk reduction (DRR) intensifies. While not the singular variable determining the efficacy of societal response to major challenges, a crucial factor is the presence of overarching strategic policy settings and cognate institutional arrangements that seek to organise the parts of a society’s capacities into a greater and coordinated whole. Do current disaster policy strategies provide an effective framework for long term, coordinated, reliable but adaptive efforts wherein DRR policy settings can meet changing and greater challenges of complex disasters? If not, what elements of policy settings need to change to do so? This chapter examines the requirements for such settings in the disaster policy domain, by reference to that domain, but more so by looking to lessons from other policy sectors and the wider literature. Significant bodies of instructive work exist examining strategic policy and institutional settings in the public policy literature, and an emerging and very relevant set of insights exploring the attributes of more successful strategic policies in policy domains such as natural resource management, sustainable development and drought. We distil from these fields principles for evaluation and design of better strategic policies and assess both their presence in and relevance to disaster policy. Our focus is on the example of the Australian federal system, but with reference to other selected jurisdictions.