Judith Neilson UTZON Lecture: Briony Rogers

David Sanderson: Hello and welcome to our eighth annual Judith Neilson lecture, which is part of the school's prestigious UTZON Lecture series, launched in 2010 to celebrate the renowned Danish architect, Jørn Utzon. My name is David Sanderson, and I'm the inaugural Judith Neilson Chair in Architecture  in the School of the Built Environment, here at UNSW, the University New South Wales.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the unceded lands of the Bidjigal people, on whose land we are currently on. I pay my respects to Elders, past, present and future, who hold the memories, traditions, culture and hopes of Indigenous Australia. 

This year's speaker, a friend and colleague, Professor Briony Rogers, who I'll introduce in a moment. And I said I’m going to embarrass you slightly, I hope you don't mind about that. But it follows on from a rich, Briony you follow on from a rich series of speakers, each of whom have taught engagingly about built environments and societal challenges. In fact, we just saw one or two people just there. In recent years, Professor George Ofori highlighted how corruption in construction fuels disasters. There's no such thing as a natural disaster, we’re part of the story. While Arup’s Dame Jo da Silva, who you just saw there, introducing cities through the eyes of children, an amazing talk, some years ago. Last year’s talk on detecting illegal Chinese detention centres was delivered by Alison Killing, the first ever architect to win a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. It's a total thrill to have Alison join us last year.

But to this year's speaker, who carries on a rich tradition of Judith Neilson Utzon talks. Briony Rogers is a Professor Monash Sustainable Development Institute, that's MSDI, where she's CEO of Fire to Flourish and Director of MSDI Water. Briony’s career is focused on strengthening how communities and practitioners create conditions for thriving communities. And we'll hear a lot about communities, that’s very much the focus of tonight and Briony’s work. She is interested in how change can be catalysed, with an emphasis on collaborative processes that shift policy and practise for the better. We were just chatting earlier and it's about, so what? It’s all about, so what? How do we change things? And I was privileged to see your slides beforehand and it is about, how do we change things?  

As CEO of Fire to Flourish, a community disaster resilience program, Briony leads a team of community members, researchers and practitioners to advance community led disaster resilience through a focus on strengthening community leadership capabilities and social capital. Through MSDI Water, Briony brings together experts in water sustainability, governance and systems change — I’m near the end. Briony has a PhD in Environmental Sociology, a Bachelor of Civil Engineering and a Bachelor of Science and a background in Engineering Consulting. In 2014, Briony was selected by the International Social Science Council as one of 20 world leading Social Science Fellows in the area of sustainable urbanisation. I think you'll agree that we have a fabulous speaker tonight, so please join me in welcoming Briony to the stage.

Briony Rogers: Thank you so much David, for welcoming me, and for inviting me to give this lecture. It's a wonderful opportunity to have a conversation around the big realities that are facing us around climate change. The impacts are being experienced all over the country, all over the world and the facts are endless. Just evidencing where we are, where we find ourselves as a society, as humanity, and as a globe. Before I get into that though, a little bit about me.

So, I grew up in Melbourne, with a single mum and she helped embed in me a really deep sense of responsibility. You know, two of us at home, I was part of a team, we had to work together to get things done. And we had a lot of conversations around social justice and feeling connected to our community. And I was always shy, fairly introverted, so I found structured ways to connect with my community, through sport or whatever it was. And so, that sense of feeling connected, and feeling belonging, and I shared a real sense of optimism. We didn't have much money growing up, but we always had that sense of, things can get better, and we have the agency and the power to drive things and to make things better. And those sorts of values, that responsibility, the community and a sense of optimism, I guess, have shaped my career. I get incredibly frustrated when the rules that someone wrote somewhere, aren't working for us, that they're getting in the way of the sorts of lives that we want to lead, or the sorts of cities we want to shape or the sorts of communities we want to grow. So that sense of, we can change things, if humans wrote the rules, and they're not working for us, then humans can change the rules. And that's the flavour, I guess, of my lecture this evening.

I started out in engineering, doing water engineering. It was right in the peak of the millennium drought, in 2006, I was a graduate water engineer and so I got trained in the deep end with all sorts of major water infrastructure projects to to work on. And then after a quite a few years, I realised that my passion for sustainability and resilience, and my interest in how communities engage in water and in the world, that engineering was only part of the solution. It's a really, really important part of the solution, but it's only part of it. And so I wanted to learn more about all the other paths, all the other levers that we have, the governance settings, the policies, the plans, the way we design our cities and our places, the way we engage with people. And so I went back to university to do my PhD in Systems Change, and in particular focused on water systems. How do we bring people together — all of those different stakeholders and people and organisations, that have a role to play in our water, shaping our water, and shaping our cities — how do we bring them together around a shared vision of the future, and be aligned in the sorts of strategic actions to get us there? 

So that was my PhD. I then had the opportunity with the Cooperative Research Center for Water Sensitive Cities to join a movement. And this CRC, some of you might be aware, it was it was large, it was a nine year collaborative research program with more than 80 industry and government partners ranging from local councils, water utilities, state government agencies, consultants, developers, universities, all coming together around a question, a recognition really, that all the assumptions we had previously around rainfall patterns, growth of cities and so on, they were no longer going to hold, and we had to rethink and reimagine how we wanted to shape our cities, and then water sustainability into the future. And so the really powerful model of bringing all of those different groups together, and investing shared energy in that direction. So that saw me through, and then in 2019 and 20, the devastating bushfires hit around Australia. And so I had the opportunity to take that thinking around resilience, and collaboration, and vision, and connection and think about that in the context of community through the Fire to Flourish program.

So I'm going to start there. I'm not going to rehash the facts and the figures around climate change. It's here, we're experiencing it. It's scary. It's a bit overwhelming at times. If I think too deeply about it, it can be quite paralysing. And yet we need to do something. If the rules that we've set for ourselves and society are letting us work in the ways that we need, design and build in the ways that we need, connect in the ways that we need, we need to do something about it.

Imagine for a moment that you were in Grafton, in the Clarence Valley. This is one of the partner communities in Fire to Flourish. Years and years of drought, all the economic challenges that come with that, all the social challenges that come with drought, and a very, very dry landscape. And then hit the most devastating bushfire season that we've had in Australia. Here six months, we talk about Black Summer to that period, but in fact it wasn't summer. The fire started in August, and it started in areas that had never, ever burned before. Huge swathes of land wiped out, and the impact on the people and their sense of optimism, and their ability to to cope, barely coping, that was all obviously really very devastating. And one of the key ingredients that matters when a community is recovering from disaster, is the ability to come together, and to heal together, and to grow together. Post-traumatic growth. But of course, this person we were imagining in Grafton was hit by COVID, as we all were. And so all of that important time to come back together as a community and say, ‘Now what? Now how are we going to rebuild from here? And how are we going to grow our community to be stronger?’ People couldn't come together for months and months, and if not years, and then just a short time later, the floods hit, huge floods again, unprecedented in their scale. And if we keep using the word unprecedented, we might get the hang of this, this is the future, is, it's quite terrifying. So one family that we're working with, they had their house wiped out by the fires and then just 12 months later, they had their business wiped out by floods. And then this community in the Clarence Valley just in the last month, they've been hit again, because I'm now thinking about Nymboida, which is just outside of Grafton. 

So these community members are already deeply traumatised, and tired, and exhausted, but once again, defending their homes against the flames. And in the communities we’re working with through Fire to Flourish, the anxiety is high, the trauma is still there and there is wonderful research by Melbourne University Lisa Gibbs and colleagues, talking about the fact that recovery from a major bushfire, it's a ten year plus journey, this is not something that happens in just, just a few years. All of these disaster experiences around the country have been a real reckoning for us. You can hear a commentary in the media around how communities have felt unsupported, felt left behind. This might be because the funding models didn't work for people, that the sorts of recovery support, financially that was available either had really tight timeframes or the criteria for the grants didn't meet what communities were needing, or that were pitting communities against each other. So, you know, two different parts of the community have equally valid and priority needs from a recovery perspective, competing against each other for limited funding to invest in that recovery journey. 

Aboriginal communities, either experiencing culturally unsafe, if not explicit racism in the way that was supported. We've had anecdotes in some of our partner communities about Aboriginal Elders being turned away from recovery centres because enough of their mob had been supported that day already. Really heartbreaking stories. And yet, we've also had incredible stories of Aboriginal leadership, stepping up and helping their whole community, drawing on that deep knowledge of Country and connection with Community to provide strength in that time of crisis.

There's a picture here emerging, that we are not yet set up for this future. For this current reality. Our communities are not yet being supported in the ways that they need. And so, all the old assumptions, all the old rules that we've been following to support communities in these extreme weather events, we need to start questioning. This model here, this very typical model behind our emergency management services, prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. But this community we've been talking about — Nymboida in the Clarence Valley — they're not just on a recovery journey, at the same time they’ve needed to be looking at reducing their disaster risk, getting ready for an extreme weather season, responding to the fires and defending, while still on their recovery journey. This creates a lot more complexity to how communities need to be supported. 

And so, in the last few years, there's been a real emerging renewed focus on resilience. The word resilience, and the idea of resilience has existed, you know, for a good few decades in the context of disaster, but it hasn't had the momentum that's now building around it. And in Fire to Flourish, and in general, the idea of resilience, I guess, brings together that concept and the framing around disaster risk and disaster impact, that embeds that in a backdrop of community development. Because when a disaster hits, it’s a moment in time for a community. But that’s with the long backdrop, a long history of that community, and its stories and evolutions, and it's got a long future ahead of it. And the disaster is a major disruptor that can be devastating, and can set a community off on a downward trajectory in terms of its wellbeing, its ability to flourish. And in particular communities experiencing long term entrenched disadvantage, are more typically exposed to higher disaster risk, have less capacities and resources to draw on because of that systemic lack of investment in basic infrastructure, education, health services and so on. And so you get this vicious cycle, the higher disaster risk, more impacts, more disadvantage. So, we need to turn that around. We've got to recognise that we can, by investing in community and investing in community development, we can be increasing the flourishing of that community while supporting that community to be able to reduce its disaster risk and reduce its impacts.

And the way we're talking about this at Fire to Flourish, is the idea of transformative resilience. When we think about the capacities that a community needs to have, when it's facing a disaster or thinking about a disaster in the future, its ability to cope when that disaster hits, to be able to respond and to cope. Well, it also needs to be able to change, a community needs to have the capacity to adapt to the changing circumstances, adapt the way that it convenes, adapt the way that shapes its environment and really importantly, transformative capacities, to get right down into the deep systemic issues, the root causes of all the challenges that are getting in the way of a community thriving, and to get to that transformative capacity, we need to be focused on self-determination and community led. And there's an excellent quote here by one of our advisory board members, Jason Ardler, “There must be a commitment to do with, not to do for. To ask, not to tell, to seek, to understand, not to assume or judge, to negotiate, not consult, and to partner, not just engage.” To take this sort of approach, this self-determined community led approach, is systems change. 

And if we look at the hierarchy, the traditional ways that our emergency management disaster sector is set up, it's that we've got our national bodies, our district and state, our local governments and then our communities and many parts of the system don't actually distinguish, don’t recognise that a local government doesn't necessarily represent that community, but the communities we speak with and work with are all very clear that the local government might be doing an excellent job, but they are not the community at large.

And so we need to be thinking about how do we flip this hierarchy so that community are at the centre, and that there's trust, there's trusting relationships with each of the layers of support and governance around it. These are the sorts of ideas that we're experimenting with and exploring in Fire to Flourish, we're trialling and scaling new ways of working with community, that do this enabling and this empowering effort to really support community led resilience building and really embedding ways of working, exploring, co-designing, co-creating and recognising that communities are partners in the knowledge generation and change work that we need to be seeing. 

There’s a few principles guiding the work that we're doing in community led, foregrounding Aboriginal wisdom. This has been transformative for our program. Not only is it an important thing for Australia to be focusing on, to support self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, particularly in the disaster resilience space, but the knowledge and the wisdom that comes with that deep connection to culture and deep connection to country, and really, the original systems thinkers, has been an important and profound way of unlocking new ideas and new directions from a change perspective, addressing inequities, strengths based, being impactful and really importantly, learning, adapting and evolving.
I think whenever we talk about change, we need to recognise that this requires innovation, which means, some of the things we’re trying won't work. And that's good because we need to learn from our failures. We need to learn from the things that haven’t worked so that we can constantly be figuring out what does. So we're working with four communities across New South Wales and Victoria, up in northern New South Wales, in the Clarence Valley and in Tenterfield, down on the south coast, in Eurobodalla and in East Gippsland, and all of those communities severely affected by the 2019, 2020 fires, and low levels on the socio economic indicators of disadvantage, and higher than average populations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. And we’re weaving research through the work we're doing on the ground with the community, so that we can be learning as we go.

Participatory processes that bring people together to envision change, to develop shared priorities, and to have a collective understanding of the strengths and capacities and needs that exist within a community. The grant funded project. So, we've got grant funding available to support our communities, but experimenting with an idea of participatory granting. So this is where communities have the power to make decisions collectively around how they want to invest in their recovery and their resilience building, and then a real focus on social capital, so building the capabilities in communities, strengthening the networks, because all the evidence points to social capital as being the most important resilience factor for communities and then through our research, weaving in evidence, generation, insights, developing tools and models that can be taken up at scale, and practical guidance recommendations and networks of change agents to ultimately drive that system change. Projects that are funded through the granting range from emergency management equipment and technology, like UHF radios and lawnmowers to reduce the risk, through to events, cultural events and music events, that bring people together to strengthen those connections; First Nations cultural connections, food security, really holistic. And that's been a really important feature to recognise that when we're talking about disaster resilience, it's actually leaning into all of its social, environmental, economic built environment, health and wellbeing elements, because all of that together is what makes a community strong, and thinking about the capabilities that are needed in a community and that already exists in the community.

Often there's a deficit framing. The poor community over there has been hit by disaster and the outsiders need to come in and help them. Sometimes outside support is absolutely needed and community led doesn't mean community alone, but we're not yet recognising all that strength and capacity that needs to be resourced and unlocked. And when it is, that starts to create a real opportunity for thinking about transforming the way that we work and the partnerships needed to be able to cope, adapt and transform in the face of climate change impacts and that networked strengthening that I've talked about.
So just a few highlights and I won't read them all out, but the emerging insights we're gathering and learning together with our community partners, understanding community is a place based system. There's complexity there, there’s dynamics there. It's changing over time. There's different levels of capacity and interest in resource flows, and power, and all of that is messy. And so you need to be supporting and empowering community to navigate that for themselves because an outsider and a top down model is not going to work. Giving focus to the social capital and the growth of those local capabilities, as well as innovative funding models that actually support communities to take the action and do the investment that they know is right for them. Connecting to Country, connecting to culture, embracing Indigenous leadership and investing and caring for Country, as a holistic practice that supports not only cultural benefit and social and economic and community benefit for the Indigenous Community, but supports healing country and land management that reduces disaster risk. And then importantly, embedding Community Voice in decision making. The ways that policies and programs are designed in our disaster resilience space at the moment doesn't yet do enough to have Community Voice front and centre at the table. 

So as I’ve been sitting back and learning these lessons along with our community partners in the Fire to Flourish space. A lot of these directions are sounding really familiar to me, and that's because these same ideas and these same patterns are emerging through the water sector. The water sector had its wake up call in the 2006, or, 2000 to 2010 millennium drought. 2006 for me, when I started as a graduate engineer. You know, we had critical drought across the country. Major infrastructure investments were needed to augment water supplies. Every sports field, every community space and place was brown, in all the major cities, and we realised the value of water. It's not just about the taps and the toilets. It's actually about water in the landscape and people's connection to water and the thriving and green landscapes that are really important to us. And then the drought broke with catastrophic floods around the country. And through all of this experience, we can look back and realise the same sorts of conclusions, that the journey of how we've shaped our water systems to service us has been evolving. And we now as a community have much broader expectations of the liveability of our communities and the liveability of our cities. And therefore, we need to think differently because all the old assumptions around our climate patterns are no longer holding as well. 

So how are we going to lean into this? What's the change agenda? As I said at the start, I was fortunate to be part of the Water Sensitive Cities Cooperative Research Centre, and these water sensitive cities principles have been a really important touchstones for the water sector. Other language might be used, integrated water management. I'm not fussed about the jargon, but the ideas behind it is important. Cities as water supply catchments. In most major cities in Australia, the amount of rainfall that lands on our city footprint is more than enough that we need in terms of drinking and consumption. But we don't catch it, we don't capture it and harvest it and clean it in ways that we can utilise that as a resource. There are some really amazing innovative projects that are starting to build in recycling, stormwater harvesting, and that's starting to take off. But this really needs to be leant into and to recognise that not all the water we use needs to be drinking water quality. Sometimes we can have low quality water that serves just as good of a job.

Cities providing ecosystem services. We know a lot about the damage, the impacts that cities have on our ecosystem services. But if we reimagine how we design and shape our built environment can actually provide ecosystem value, you know, through greening, through cleaning our water with nature, by solutions, food production and so on. And cities with water sensitive communities recognising that that socio-political capital, community feeling, the role of being a steward of their local area, their local waterscape, is a really important pathway, and we need to be fostering that connection to water and that sense of responsibility in our communities.

Part of my research over the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, was action research, with hundreds of people involved in the water sector in some shape or form around the country, and got to have all kinds of conversations around, you know, where do we find ourselves? What’s our vision for the future? What are the barriers? How do we change? What are our priorities? And what emerged out of that was a real shared vision. Every context is different, just like every community is different. And we're talking about disaster resilience. But there are common themes that are emerging. Happy active people, green spaces, healthy ecosystems, innovation, efficient resource use, collaborative integrated governance, powered community stewardship, First Nations knowledge and values. They can see those themes, they really parallel and align with what is being experienced in learned through the disaster space.
And this research also explored the change pathways. If we've got a vision for a water sensitive future, how do we get there? Given our traditional water systems are typically designed, big pipes in, big pipes out, it's all underground. We… designing and managing our systems for single objectives, not thinking about that integrated whole. So we need to change our on ground practices, we’ve got to change the way we plan and design to take that integrated view, to bridge across silos so that people involved in the planning, people involved in the landscape design, people involved in the water engineering, people involved in the community engagement, that they're all coming together to take a shared view. And we need to enable that through structures like policies and strategies and plans and incentives, as well as that socio-political capital, the leadership, the vision, the capacity, the networks.

And so now if I step right back and look across the water and the disaster space, there's some clear patterns in the way that we need to be thinking about things going forward. We need to think holistically. We need to move beyond our silos. How do we bring all of these different ways of thinking together and place based work that really empowers that local knowledge, that local capacity, is critical. There is not a one size fits all solution that every community and every city is different. But there are building blocks that appear to be really important and really promising. So how do we bridge across silos, bring different knowledge systems together? How do we be creative and investing in small incremental ways over the long term?

In the millennium drought, we were not ready, as a country. All the projections, all the future predictions of rainfalls said we were 20, 30, 40 years off needing any major augmentation to our water supply. But within two years we were having to make really critical, major investments in  the infrastructure, in a setting where it was difficult to bring the community along some of that journey. For example, the Melbourne desalination plant had huge community backlash because every community member had been doing their bit, doing the buckets in the shower, investing in the water efficient appliances, and then a major infrastructure decision was made. I'm not commenting on whether that was the right or wrong decision, but we need to be able to get to a point where  we’re investing for resilience over time and not waiting for those crisis moments.

Decentralisation is a common theme, if we're taking that place based view and we know that all the capacity needs to come from a local source, then we need to be okay with some power sharing, and investing, whether that's in local government, that has a really important role to play in that local community servicing, or in grassroots community members that the top down, just like, big pipes in, big pipes out, from an infrastructure perspective, is no longer fit for purpose, big governance models that don't unlock that local capacity is also no longer fit for purpose. So we've got to be investing in all of that. It's quite overwhelming when we think about the many different changes that are needed to get us there. But it's also heartening to think about the big changes we have already gone through in society.
Let's take a moment, think back 30, 40, 50 years. What are some of the big changes that we've experienced? We've gone from horse and cart, to the automobile. We've got gender rights, we've got marriage equality, we've got amazing technological innovations. The crisis, the situation we find ourselves, it's quite overwhelming, but we can think proactively and constructively, and lean into that change agenda.
The first thing we have to do, though, is recognise and embrace and understand the sort of system that we're working with. This is obviously not a simple system. We're not just making toast. It's also not a complicated system. A plane is a complicated system. It's a machine with many different paths that need to come together and work together. And you need really highly specialised technical knowledge to get that plane in the air, and have it land safely. But in general, if you pull the lever, the thing you expect to do will happen. And most planes have some fairly common bits and pieces sitting within it. What we're talking about is a complex system. Imagine a child. A child is not a machine. It grows and evolves and the influences around it shape how it engages in the world. It has role models and supports, and coaches of various forms, helping a child grow from an infant up to a thriving adult. And this is the way we need to think about our water system, a disaster resilient system. Whichever system is thinking about this change, let's lean into this complexity. And what's critical is that we're not breaking down the machine into its individual component parts. We're seeing it as a network and the relationships between those individual parts is key. And when we think about those relationships and all the different ways those relationships can evolve, we see that many different things are possible, but we can't command and control a child. We can't command and control a Great Barrier Reef. We can't command and control our ecosystem of people and infrastructure and systems. There’s too many uncertainties and surprises when those relationships between the parts come together in different ways. But the key feature of a complex adaptive system is that it can adapt, it can learn, it can sense. And this is how we need to start engaging with the world, whether our job is as an engineer, as a community engager, as a policymaker, we need to start thinking in terms of systems, align on a vision of where we want to head, sense what's going on, find the leverage points of change, this is not a linear, straightforward pathway. There might be long periods of slow incremental change that feels like you're not getting anywhere, but then there'll be a tipping point, and at some point that tipping point starts to send you off on an accelerated journey, and to start to stabilise into a new way of doing things, or a new technology being adopted or whatever it is.

Path dependency is a big issue. What I mean by that is, all the things we've been investing in for decades and decades before, make it very difficult to start investing in something different. If you've been, if you've got billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, big pipes infrastructure that's in the ground now, to start investing in small bits and pieces of infrastructure in that decentralised way feels challenging.
And often we find ourselves getting locked into efficiency only innovation. So, for example, if we start to invest in energy efficient appliances in our house, that's great. But if we start to build our houses three times as big, with three times as many appliances, we're not getting any net gains. So we want to avoid lock in, we want to avoid backlash. There might be some really promising innovations, new ways of doing things that seem like they’ve got awesome uptake, really great promise, it’s going to save the world. But the implementation detail might not be thought through. The pink batts, insulation crisis, is a good example, a great idea, great technology. But some of the implementing detail wasn't thought through and not implemented properly without the right regulatory settings, to tragic results.

So we want to avoid backlash. We've got to think through how these new solutions and new practices are going to be embedded. We could also say, ‘This is too hard. We can't actually deal with this, and the change is too big and too difficult and too contested’. That doesn't mean change isn't going to happen. It just means that that change will be imposed on us.

And so, how do we start to shape and steer and find the leverage points to stay on this line to our new practices, and whatever domain we're working in? Another model I find really helpful is, is the iceberg model, that effectively talks about the things that we see above the waterline, the events, the patterns of things that we observe, actually influenced by a whole lot of other things that sit under that waterline. At the most shallow level, the policies and the practices, the way we organise our resource flows, are influencing what we experience above the waterline. We need to change them. But if we really want to drive and need to drive down into transformative change, which is what we're facing right now, we've got to get right down into the relational changes, the power dynamics. Who’s got power in a particular setting? What relationships exist? How are we connecting? And then ultimately our mental models, our paradigms. How are we understanding ourselves? How are we understanding our connection to nature? How are we understanding the role of community in a disaster?

I find the power dynamics one a really interesting one, from both the water and the emergency in disaster space. In the water sector, part of the change journey conversations I've been having over the last decade is with engineers who feel quite threatened. All of a sudden, you know, their role as the dominant decision maker and designer of all things water, is no longer, they’re no longer holding that same power. And the conversation has had to be, ‘You have a really important role, we still need our water infrastructure to be designed excellently from an engineering perspective, but we also have to make room for other perspectives’. We've got to make room for the landscape architects and the ecologists and the community members and so on. And so we've got to start creating more open spaces, for different disciplinary perspectives to come together. And exactly the same conversation I think is happening in the disaster sector, where our emergency services, our firefighters that had an incredibly, and still have, an incredibly important role to play when a community gets hit by disaster. And so sometimes there's a sense of feeling threatened that we're not going to have the same power, or there's so much risk that we're managing on behalf of the community. That it's too risky to share power. That can't be the conversation. This is not about reducing any of the importance of the role of the fire and emergency services, but it's saying we need to make room for more. Community also have a role to play. Local government has a role to play. There's service providers, there's an ecosystem of players that need to come together to help get the best outcomes for community.

There are a lot of barriers, and these barriers here apply both across the water and the disaster space. The governance settings aren't right, they’re are too hierarchical. Our models of funding and pricing aren’t fit for purpose, conservative risk appetite. And we can spend the next 1,500 years taking down each brick at a time. And we do need to remove those bricks, but we don't have time to do that piece by piece, we need to start thinking about creating the springboard that leaps us over those bricks. Leaps us over those barriers. You start seeing the transformative change now, and so it's helpful to think about what enables change. Barriers are real. They're important. We've got to engage with them. But actually, what do we need to do proactively to come together to drive change? This is research that we've done that I guess consolidates all the different sorts of things that seem to help, seem to make a difference. We need champions. We need leadership at all scales. We need community leadership, scientific leadership, government leadership, industry leadership. All of this leadership needs to come together. And going down the column is, I guess, the maturity of a transition. So early in a transition, the sort of leadership that we might see and that might be important are activists highlighting the problem, putting a spotlight and saying, guys, we've got to take this seriously. And as we get more mature and we lean into this change journey and starting to see champions, starting to speak up, advocating for new solutions, connecting up with each other and getting into influential positions, so that ultimately you've got governments and multi-stakeholder networks driving this change agenda.

So as I come towards the end of my talk, have a think about some of the questions in your roles, whatever roles they might be. How are you nurturing diversity in leadership? This is really important for change. How are we connecting champions to each other? And connecting champions into positions of power? Are there organisations that can step up and be organisational champions of change? How do we grow networks for champions to come together and be supported? Another key enabler is platforms for connecting. We know that collaboration and integration is really important, but it doesn't happen in a vacuum. We need to be really intentional about creating these sorts of spaces so that we can bridge the silos, whether that's jurisdictional or disciplinary or sectoral.

The water sector needs to work with the energy sector, needs to work with the planning sector, needs to work with the transport sector, to create a place that helps communities thrive. T Shaped professionals — you might have heard of this idea before — this is a really important piece of the puzzle. The individuals need to have that deep disciplinary depths, but we’ve also got to be fostering in our professionals, the skills that allow that collaboration, the soft skills that help people come together, that generate a sense of humility, a core value of humility that you cannot do collaboration, you can't bring different knowledge systems together if you're coming at it from a perspective of, ‘I know the way things work, and the way that I see going forward is what we all need to do’. We've got to be able to come with humility, with open ears and open hearts to find a shared pathway forward. 

The CSC for Water Sensitive Cities was a really important platform for connecting, and those industry partners, around 80 of them around the country, three universities, all around a shared vision and a shared agenda for change. And I think this sort of model of collaborative research is a really important direction.

And just a shout out to my colleagues at the DisasterWISE Communities Network. This is a network that Fire to Flourish catalysed. There's all kinds of networks for policymakers and practitioners in the emergency disaster space, but not yet a platform for community to connect with each other, and learn from each other, and provide peer support, and access to resources and stories that help normalise, point to solutions, help communities on their journey.

Knowledge. We need knowledge. We need new knowledge to deal with these challenges that we're facing, and we need to be really mindful, though, of whose knowledge are we listening to. Who’s knowledge might not be at the table, and I'm thinking particularly about community knowledge and community lived experience and lived expertise as well as indigenous and First Nations knowledge. How are we bringing those knowledge systems into the way we think about change? How are we bringing our systems thinking? How are we generating the scientific evidence based knowledge, and how are we also developing the practical and experiential knowledge, of putting new practices into the way we work. Projects. We need real, tangible projects that show what's possible, but we need to be very mindful that projects do not change systems. If you've ever had success measures or projects, they need to be on time and on budget and to quality. But if you're going to meet those criterias of being on time and quality and budget, then you're necessarily isolating that project from all the reality of the complex world that it's in. Instead, we need to be thinking about, how do projects help us learn? How do projects help us relate? How do projects help us come together so that we are aligned in terms of our vision and our strategy?
We need to package things up so they're implementable. But projects don't change systems, processes do. Processes that help bring people together, and have that transformative aha moment, that gets right down into that mental model. And then finally, how are we developing the tools and the guidance, whether that's technical design guidance or administrative guidance, like policies and targets and standards. How are we codifying all the work that we need to do, in tools and guidance, that help drive change at scale, because we fall into the trap of doing an amazing pilot project here and a demonstration project there. We need them when we're experimenting with new work, but then we need to be thinking about the scaling pathways. How are we going to rapidly learn about how these new ways of working can be put into place? And how do we get our governance settings, our resource settings, etc. ready to get that change at scale? 

A final thought I'll leave you with, and this is a quote that Professor Anne Poelina, around the Fitzroy River region has shared — amazing First Nations leader. “All we have is time and energy, and we all have really important day jobs to do. But how do we start to bring into our day jobs all of these enablers of change because we don’t have time to waste, we’ve got to start driving transformative shifts in the way that we’re working, the way that we’re engaging, really implement the way that we're relating with each other so that we can start to pave the way, pave our way forward into a shared transformative vision of the future.”
Thank you. 

David Sanderson: Thank you so much, Briony. There's so much to say. So much to unpack. For those of us working in this area, knowledgeable and experienced as we all are, in this room around the realities you touched on, I think everything, when it comes to big issues. I mean, thank you for starting with a personal story. That's quite a thing to choose to share about growing up, single parent, and having that sense of connection, and then talking about fire and water and an elemental approach. You see what I did there, sort of weaved that in? Thinking about things that are pressing and serious in our lives right now in Australia, but also elsewhere. The existential risk, but yet also ending, not ending or discussing for the most part, what we can do. Because we can make a difference. We've risen to the challenge before on other things, and this is our challenge for this and the next to the last generation, all that kind of stuff. But with energy and time we can do many things. We have some time for questions. I'm selfishly going to ask the first one, because I can. And it's of course, an impossible question. You talk about business as usual. What's the one thing that frustrates you the most about it? About business as usual, that needs to change?

Briony Rogers: That there's not the trust in people. That there is a sense of, where power lies at the moment, that there's not yet the trust in what people can do if supported, if invested in, if resourced and if scaffolded, that change can happen and it must happen, because we don't have the capacity for every community that's on fire, all at the same time, for people to, you know, to be all supported at once. So we've got to start letting go and building up that local capacity. So I think trust in each other, trust in community and recognising that trust takes time. Roxanne, in the video, talked about moving at the pace of trust, and that's been a really important idea to hold on to, in our Fire to Flourish program in particular, that if we're not building trust in our communities, then we can't do the work together. And so I think we don't prioritise at the moment, in the way we set up our businesses, and our work, time for trust building and relationships. Which is why I shared my personal story, because I think we need to meet human to human first. And then through that we can connect and grow that trust. So you can then do really productive, transformative work.

David Sanderson: Well, I'm sorry, I can't help but ask a second question. How do the systems and institutions we have, trust that trust? And how do they change to do that? 
Briony Rogers: We need to have the conversations, we need to to build those connections, and we need to explore together and co-create together. You know, one of the hesitations that we had in Fire to Flourish, when we first started to engage with the communities we’re working with, to invite their participation, was; how are they going to feel about the research part? How are they going to feel about the systems change part? There’s so much they've gone through as a community, but, you know, it's been a really important part of the model, that we’re honouring those lived experiences by building the systematic learning and scaling into the work. But it's been incredible how much our community partners have valued this research and systems change elements, because they want to help other people, they want to be part of the solutions. If they're supported to really understand what's going on, and the things we need to think about, then they're right up for it. And their voice, and their experience, and their expertise, can be part of the co-creation of the way forward. So I think we've got to open up the spaces, to invite those different sorts of conversations, and different voices together. 

David Sanderson: Thank you. I'm going to hold off, because I'm sure there are many questions. May I open the floor? Open to any questions? 

Martin Locke: So my name's Martin Locke. I just be interested in your views and how successful have the New South Wales Government’s efforts been around the Northern Rivers, and the effort that they've made setting up the Reconstruction Corporation?

Briony Rogers: Yeah, the place based approach is really important and I think it's been some important, important directions and important steps in bringing different players around the table. I think there's still a major reckoning and shift that all governments are needing to go through, in terms of, really understanding and engaging with what it looks like to empower communities to be part of that journey, with a really strong and important voice. So, important first steps, but collectively, a long way to go.
David Sanderson: But maybe I could just follow up on that. Given the complexity of the Northern Rivers and the terrible series of disasters that have been and heaven forbid there are more, but, you know, a lot of the signs are there's an ongoing thing that you talked about. All business as usual isn't working too. We need to rethink recovery. About, is this an ongoing thing? Is it a shift in something, do you think?

Briony Rogers: I mean, I think our reality is that communities, many of the communities in high risk areas are going to be perpetually in recovery, in the sense that the disasters are coming more frequently, and the rebuilding work, the reconnecting work, the healing work that's needed for people's mental health, all of that is changing a time dynamic, in terms of what work needs to be done by community. I think one of the big challenges that we have at the moment is our funding models to support community work on the ground, tend to be around disaster. A disaster has to hit, it needs to be declared a disaster, and then that unlocks funding, that some community members, if they're really good at writing grant applications, can get access to, to be able to support their recovery. But we need to be having the funding models that support all that risk reduction work, in a community led way, the preparedness work. So what's the ongoing funding model that means a community can draw on the resources it needs, at any stage in its journey, regardless of whether it's labelled preparedness or recovery. 

David Sanderson: Yes, may I say, I think that's a really vital point. The point you made about projects that, in and of themselves, is great, and we yet, we all know the short termism, the impacts, the long term thing, it's really hard to do that. And that's a systemic issue there is, especially around the electoral cycle, and authorities and all those things. 

Briony Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. 

David Sanderson: Thank you. May we open another question, please?

Corrie Williams: Hello. Corrie Williams, Master Builders Victoria. I was just wondering, have you seen examples in other industries, or with other issues, where these place based, and system change approaches have been successful? Have you seen it? This model work, and be translated into other areas?

Briony Rogers: In general, we're seeing community action showing, doing really important work. And if you look globally around the climate, like the old moniker, you know, ‘think globally, act local’, you know, this idea of local action and place based work has been part of our fabric. But I think more recently we're really leaning into it, in terms of investing and understanding what it takes for local actors to come together. You know, there's all kinds of really great collectives and so on, that I wonder what it would look like to be really intentional about that, and to have our institutional settings set up, set it to really grow and foster that.

David Sanderson: I've never met anybody who's ever said community led, community centred, is not the right approach. And yet the tools that we have, and you relate to command and control, and of course we need that in the immediacy of a disaster. Of course we do. And yet after that, command and control can be a problem when it comes to locally owned, place based approaches. As you're saying, it's a challenge that we're all aware of, and is hard to square.
Briony Rogers: And the communities we're working with, some of them say that the bushfire, it was traumatising, but in fact the deeper trauma came from the disempowering that happened in the aftermath. Outsiders coming in, taking over community pop up centres that have been established to support really local recovery efforts, an outsider coming in, taking over, disempowering and deprioritising the things that the communities had decided for themselves as being important. So I think that's something to be really mindful when thinking about trauma and experience, it’s not just that disaster moment where, of course you need command and control, when you're trying to evacuate and move people around to be safe. But that's that moment. And so what's the long journey ahead, and what had been the long journey before that was empowering of community?

Student Question: Hi, Briony and David, thanks for this inspiring lecture. It's truly mind blowing. I'm actually a student here. I'm finishing my Master's degree of Property Development. Actually working with a number of classmates and collaborating a start up company, modular buildings, and particularly looking at 10-40 Aboriginal housing projects around regional New South Wales. This, what you discussed, just then, you said in terms of consulting the Indigenous community, and also the Elders and knowledge really hits in my heart, because that’s something we are actually consulting, to build sustainable modular homes, to sustain floods, fire, as well as suitable for the Aboriginal culture. However, this is the business part, and me, I’m very commercialised. But I’d like to know how can business be involved in your project, Fire to Flourish? Because I'm hearing a lot of funding plans, it’s all government driven and community driven, but I think there’s a power of commercial, a power of a business, such as a start up. I’d like to know, what your vision, and how do you think is a pathway for business to get involved with your project, and the overall vision ahead? Thank you. 

Briony Rogers: Absolutely, the business community is really critical. And when if we think about community as that place based system, the role of business in a really local scale is is critical, in getting businesses up and running after a disaster has been hit, to provide that critical resource and capacity and community to support the longer term recovery, has been a really important, important function in communities. So, I think at that local scale, businesses are really important, but we can also be thinking at the broader scale. One of our collaboration partners is Australian Business Volunteers, and what we're seeing in our communities is they might have amazing, really promising ideas around how they want to invest in recovery efforts, or shape the future. But some communities happen to have retired professionals that live in their community and are able to volunteer their time to help bring a project to life, but many don’t. And so what do those communities do? How do they access that professional expertise, or the other capacity that exists in our business community? And so Australian Business Volunteers, one of their programs, is providing that network of business professionals, that can be a resource for community to draw on, to access that expertise in really self-determined ways. I think there's all kinds of innovative thinking that we can be doing around how business is part of this ecosystem. Again, that’s system speaking, what are the different resources and capacities that we have in this country, or in this community, and how do we set ourselves up to mobilise and harness them all to be of service to community? 

This is something that we're thinking about at Monash University, and we've got, it’s great to hear about your degree that you just finished, the placemaking work that we had a small video of, we're actually building in collaboration with our Masters of Planning, Masters of Urban Planning and Masters of Architecture. So, those workshops, that were being facilitated was actually a master's students running studios to go out to community and provide facilitation, support, design support, to listen to community ideas, help them understand their local place, and then convert those ideas into concept plans that they can then be put to the community for them to figure out, co-develop, prioritise, and then we'll be offering grant funding to help the community to be able to take those concepts into the next stages of development.

I think this is just a taste of some of the innovative thinking we can be doing in the university world, around how can university be a capacity to all community, to draw on, because there's so much knowledge, and skills, and infrastructure, and systems, and passion that exists within universities, within the student body, within the research community and university staff in general. So, what could it look like for us to bring down the walls of universities, so that we are there to be of service to community through partnership? 
David Sanderson: That sounds like a perfect ending. Thank you very much to Emma Stone, to the team, to others for putting this on. But most of all, you won't be surprised for me to say thank you so much to Briony Rogers. Briony you’re… is heading pretty much straight back to Melbourne to lead a workshop, first thing tomorrow morning. You’re super busy, we’re so grateful and thank you again for sharing real inspiration, I think. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Briony Rogers: Thank you so much. 

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