Seeing our own backyard through new eyes
The RRANZ team have just spent a week with a group of Manaaki Scholarship recipients as part of RRANZ's training consortium work.
The Manaaki Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience course sits within the New Zealand Government's Manaaki Scholarships Programme, and is designed to build practical capability in risk assessment, emergency planning and community resilience for participants from across Southeast Asia.
Held at Massey University from 15 to 19 June, this cohort of 28 participants came from Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Viet Nam.
In our own sector, we're often quick to focus on what New Zealand doesn't do well in disaster risk reduction and emergency management - the gaps, the funding constraints, the things still on the "to do" list. The team found it genuinely useful to spend the week with this group and see, through their eyes, how much New Zealand actually gets right.
A few things stood out over the course of the week:
- Our understanding of our own hazards. The depth of hazard knowledge New Zealand has built up, and how routinely it's applied, isn't something every country has the luxury of.
- Our public education. Campaigns that explain hazards to communities in plain, practical terms are something New Zealanders sometimes take for granted.
- Our community-centred approach. Enabling communities, rather than managing them from the top down, is a genuine point of difference and one participants were keen to take home.
It's a useful reminder that resilience work benefits from a two-way exchange. There's a lot to learn from bringing an international lens to our own systems - sometimes as much as participants take away from the course itself.
Tracy Hatton co-facilitated the course alongside Jon Mitchell, Dave Parsons, Sally McKay and Maureen Mooney.