Community participation in emergency planning: NSW State Emergency Service case study

There is growing recognition within the Australian emergency management sector of the need to engage communities as core partners, where they are considered equals in risk-related decision-making processes that affect them (Attorney-General’s Department 2013). There is, however, little guidance available to practitioners about how best to involve communities in risk reduction processes and little evidence on which to build approaches. To address these gaps, the New South Wales State Emergency Service (NSW SES) instigated a pilot program to investigate and evaluate methods to involve communities in flood emergency planning within three NSW communities. This paper outlines the pilot process, the design of programs and evaluation results.

Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Volume 32, Issue 2, April 2017, Pages 28-34. The Australian Journal of Emergency Management by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International license.