Blythe J Mclennan

• PhD
• Fellow at RMIT University

This paper examines the thorny issue of authority and legitimacy in relation to ‘outsider’ emergency volunteering within the context of the community resilience policy agenda. Outsider emergency volunteering is any volunteering that: (a) aims to assist communities in any aspect of disaster preparedness, response, relief and recovery, and (b) is not...

This paper reports on a case study of collective coproduction in an Australian community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) project called “Be Ready Warrandyte”. The first goal of the case study was to understand what interactions and power-sharing between citizens and government “looked and felt like” in a significant example of community-led...

There is a growing expectation that volunteers will have a greater role in disaster management in the future compared to the past. This is driven largely by a growing focus on building resilience to disasters. At the same time, the wider landscape of volunteering is fundamentally changing in the twenty-first century. This paper considers implicatio...

This paper presents a case study of Emergency Volunteering - Community Response to Extreme Weather (EV CREW). EV CREW is a best-practice model for centrally coordinating spontaneous volunteers who respond during emergencies. The model was developed by Volunteering Queensland, a not-for-profit organisation and the peak volunteering body in Queenslan...

Despite highly specialised and capable emergency management systems, ordinary citizens are usually first on the scene in an emergency or disaster, and remain long after official services have ceased. Citizens often play vital roles in helping those affected to respond and recover, and can provide invaluable assistance to official agencies. However,...

Costa Rica's Payments for Environmental Services (PES) has been held as a promising option for valuing environmental services in developing countries. We undertook a systematic evaluation of academic and grey literatures and used narrative analysis and policy transfer evaluation to identify the global and local interactions that underpinned the suc...

distil and summarise some key conclusions regarding developing public policy for natural hazard risk inAustralia. • ABSTRACT The 2011 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (COAG 2011) sets the context for natural disaster management as a 'shared responsibility' of all sectors of government and society, as part of building a more comprehensive a...

Developing resilient communities and sharing responsibility for hazard management is the key to Australia’s ‘National Strategy for Disaster Resilience’. There are, however, a wide range of conflicting views on the appropriate responsibilities of governments, citizens and communities that are not well recognised in the national policy discourse. Wha...

Recent approaches in natural resource management emphasize decision makers’ need for research that (1) encompasses a landscape or regional scale, (2) uses multiple scales of analysis, and (3) has a relatively timely research process. This article presents a novel qualitative research methodology that seeks to increase research salience (relevance)...

In this paper, we look beyond Australian fire and emergency management to compare ways that responsibility-sharing – broadly conceived – has occurred in other places and sectors where risks to community safety are faced. Responsibility-sharing occurs any time there is collective action, and formal and informal institutions provide the “rules of the...

In the context of risk, the concept of responsibility incorporates the notion that certain parties have a prospective obligation to undertake actions to manage risk. However, differences in judgements about which parties are responsible for which aspects of risk management often lead to social conflict. This paper uses the heuristic of a ‘responsib...

The work reported here examined intra-regional differences in land use and livelihood changes made by landholders during a forest transition in a dry region of North-West Costa Rica. It drew on the Sustainable Livelihoods Analysis framework to evaluate a qualitative, comparative study of landholders’ access to livelihood resources in two key landho...

Reshaping Environments: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability in a Complex World draws together a team of specialist authors from disciplines including urban planning, social sciences, engineering and environmental science to examine the diverse influences humans have upon the natural environment. This interdisciplinary approach presents...

For much of the post war period it was individual states that drove improvements in human security. But now in an era of global economic, business, political and cultural forces, the role and power of national governments to reduce vulnerability, and improve human security can seem unclear at best. At a regional level, the European Union has shown...

Traditionally Land Use Cover Change (LUCC) studies have focused on processes of negative land-cover change, primarily deforestation, partially because examples of positive land-cover change were not common. During the last two decades an outstanding tropical dry forest restoration process had taken place in the province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica, w...

In this paper I contribute to the collective goals of the symposium by considering the learning opportunities presented in one of the case studies from the textbook being developed for the subject Reshaping Environments. The case studies are practical examples of 'real world' interdisciplinary research that are presented in a way that makes the res...