Recovery and Development: Perspectives from New Zealand and Australia

This chapter discusses the relationship between resilience, recovery, and development in relation to the 2009 Victoria, Australia wildfires and the 2011 Christchurch earthquake; events that have had significant implications for Australian and New Zealand approaches to Disaster Risk Reduction and post-disaster development. Following a review of the resilience literature, discussion is framed around three issues. The first is people’s accounts of the disruption and challenges encountered and how they responded to them. The second issue builds on observed differences between community groups with regard to how well they responded to these challenges to examine how individual and community variability in adaptive capacities contribute to explaining differences in the reported effectiveness of community recovery activities. The third issue focuses on how lessons learned from these events are facilitating the on-going development in communities that can expect to face hazard events in the future. The scale, complexity, national significance and duration of these events provide opportunities to build understanding of how the adaptive capacities of people (e.g., self-efficacy), communities (e.g., inclusivity, sense of community, collective efficacy) and government agencies and businesses (e.g., empowerment, trust) can, individually and collectively, facilitate recovery and development in the aftermath of a major disaster.