Organizing for Resilience During Complex Climate Crises: Lessons from Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires
Join UNSW for the upcoming ICRR Seminar commencing at 1:30pm, followed by light refreshments at 2:30pm. This is a hybrid event, you can join online.
This presentation reports findings from a multi-year Australian Research Council project examining collective action and collaborative governance during and after the 2019-2020 “Black Summer” bushfires. Drawing on four interconnected research streams focused on governance, learning, community resilience, and decision-making, the presentation explores how diverse actors coordinate, learn, adapt, and make decisions in the context of increasingly complex climate-related crises. Particular attention is given to governance gaps exposed during these events, the challenges of translating lessons into collective learning, the organizational conditions that enable community resilience, and the accountability dynamics that shape crisis decision-making at different levels. The presentation concludes by discussing implications and future directions for this ongoing research program.
Bios:
Markus A. Höllerer (markus.hoellerer@unsw.edu.au) is a professor of organization and management at UNSW Sydney, Australia. He also holds affiliations at WU Vienna, Austria; and IAE Business School, Argentina. His current research focuses on the study of shifting institutional arrangements, social change, collective action in crisis situations, novel forms of organization and governance, digital sustainability, and institutions as multimodal accomplishments.
Jaco Fourie (w.fourie@unsw.edu.au) is a Lecturer in Organization and Management Studies at the UNSW Business School. His research addresses the pressing challenges organizations face in navigating severe climate-induced crises. He examines how these events disrupt established routines and practices, expose the limitations of existing governance arrangements and their implications for how and what we need to learn in the wake of crisis.
Ines Kuric (i.kuric@unsw.edu.au) is a postdoctoral fellow at the UNSW Business School, School of Management and Governance. Her doctoral research at WU Vienna examined the role of communication in institutional change and how language shapes collective beliefs about new practices and possible futures, placing particular emphasis on verbal, visual, and multimodal forms of communication. Building on these interests, her current work focuses on the rhetoric of novelty and future orientation, sensegiving during crises, and communicative strategies for enhancing literacy across different contexts.
Free
