Serrao-Neumann, SilviaHanna, Christina JaneCretney, RavenTennakoon, Kishani2023-11-072023https://hdl.handle.net/10289/16118As small-scale disasters start to occur more frequently, their impacts accumulate with time and may become intolerable for the communities affected. These impacts tend to be small but frequent, which makes them chronic. Despite this, because of their less significant immediate effects, they receive little attention in both research and practice. Small-scale recurring disasters are often triggered by climate-related events and are characterised by localised floods, landslides, and storms, as well as being linked to the underlying causes of vulnerability. There aren’t specific and clear policies in disaster risk governance that address the emergency response to and recovery from small-scale recurring disasters. Thus, they fall through risk assessment processes because those processes do not sufficiently capture them thereby preventing their evaluation by higher levels in the decision-making process. This leads to the employment of short-term resilience strategies for the recovery from these events, such as insurance mechanisms, which may obscure the underlying issues and exacerbate community vulnerability in the long run. Consequently, they may grow into major problems, increasing the opportunity costs associated with failed interventions. It is therefore imperative to revisit current disaster risk governance frameworks, as they tend to focus mainly on large-scale disasters and neglect small-scale recurring ones. This is so that guidelines and criteria used to inform decisions in disaster risk governance frameworks, especially pertaining to emergency management services activation and resources, address small-scale recurring disasters to ensure timely responses and appropriate community recovery. This thesis contributes to fill this gap in knowledge by specifically investigating the extent to which small-scale recurring disasters are being accounted for by Aotearoa New Zealand’s emergency management system, through a qualitative case study approach. In doing so, this research aims to inform current and future disaster risk governance policies and practices regarding small-scale recurring disasters, to ensure better outcomes for affected communities. To this end, the research is guided by three questions, which were addressed using multi research methods predominately of qualitative nature. The research questions are: 1. To what extent are small-scale recurring disasters incorporated in Aotearoa New Zealand’s emergency management frameworks? 2. How can the identification and classification of disaster scales and related impacts be improved to account for a broader spectrum of disasters, and better inform disaster management policies and practice? 3. How can current practices enable a more comprehensive and equitable entry point for local disaster response and recovery, and thus improve the adaptation capacity of affected communities? With respect to adopted research methods, firstly, a policy document analysis of high order emergency management documents was carried out using the content analysis method. Secondly, secondary data of flood disasters gathered from online sources for a 30-year period were analysed using simple statistical methods in Microsoft Excel. Finally, primary data collected through semi-structured interviews with emergency management specialists were thematically analysed, with support of NVivo qualitative data analysis software. Based on the findings, this thesis offers a number of insights for improving disaster risk governance related to small-scale recurring disasters in Aotearoa New Zealand, and elsewhere. Firstly, drawing on the policy analysis of high order emergency management documents, it exposes the gaps in policies and corresponding practices in the country’s current emergency management framework. The analysis confirms the ambiguity of the policies and their associated processes when dealing with small-scale recurring disasters, as well as the disconnection between top-down policy directives and on-the-ground actions. This leads to a lack of appropriate mechanisms for both policies and practices to understand the characteristics of small-scale recurring disasters, which are important to determine not only the risk these disasters posed to communities, but the impacts they create. Secondly, the secondary data analysis of flood disaster events over a 30-year period showed that there are many gaps and inconsistencies in both disaster data collection and recording. These gaps tend to create inconsistent and inequitable allocation of emergency management resources to affected communities, especially when multiple disasters occur concurrently. The analysis confirmed the need for more detailed information and data on a range of disasters scales and their impacts, so as to identify potential chronic disaster conditions and inform emergency management policies and decisions. This is important, as climate change is already increasing the frequency and severity of extreme events and stretching resource availability even further. Lastly, the analysis of empirical data from emergency management specialists confirms the need for improved decision-making criteria to guide emergency management response and recovery related to small-scale recurring disasters, to provide an equitable service delivery to the affected communities. This analysis also highlights the need for streamlining and scaling up community-driven approaches for the management of small-scale recurring disasters, because it requires a place-based approach with communities at the forefront. This thesis has encountered several challenges, including the COVID 19 pandemic and the subsequent disasters pertaining to natural hazards that affected Aotearoa New Zealand during the study period. These challenges have limited the number of participants for the interviews and the opportunity to carry out field research at the community level to determine affected communities’ perspective on confronting small-scale recurring disasters. There was also a limitation to the publicly available impact data and information related to small-scale disasters, and that limitation has implications on the study results. Further, the research was limited to the analysis of flood disaster data and the concurrent disasters were not considered, to mitigate the complexity of the research. Therefore, future research on small-scale recurring disasters at the community level and interviews with a larger number of on-the-ground specialists could provide further insights for informing disaster risk governance frameworks and corresponding policies and practices.  enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Emergency responsedisaster recoveryEmergency managementcumulative impactsThesis2023-11-07