A Resilience Checklist – a guide for doing things differently and acting collectively

Resilience Checklist version 1.0 July 2020
A Technical Report from CSIRO to Queensland Reconstruction Authority

This report introduces a Resilience Checklist as an approach to guiding co-ordination of methods, practice and collective impact for Queensland agencies delivering services and common goals in the future, in a way which is disaster-resilient and adaptive to change. A Resilience Checklist will enable individual agencies to assess their approach, tools and progress, as well as to compare activities and progress across organisations. The use of the Resilience Checklist by individual organisations to check their own approaches, and form the basis for collaboration and collective action. • Why is the Resilience Checklist needed? Across many policy areas of Queensland there are common aspirations for achieving similar outcomes. • There is, however, a need to improve the technical coherence and co-ordination around the practices of resilience, adaptation, disaster risk reduction, economic development and transitions, and integrated planning, while still allowing for the varied interpretations of definitions and tools/method that different organisations already have. • Queensland State agency stakeholders do not need another tool for ‘how to do’ resilience and adaptation, as there are already multiple approaches in play. The Resilience Checklist provides the guidance to co-ordinate practice. • The Resilience Checklist supports organisations in a range of ways to reach common goals. • Steps include 1. Bring your context and tools 2. Use the Checklist to assess practice 3. Check the organisation’s pathways. Will they get to defined goals, in a way which is disaster-resilient and adaptive to change? 4. Fill in gaps identified by the Checklist and align with international, Asia-Pacific and national approaches 5. Mature the collective impact by collaborating across a range of organisations. This is the first version of a ‘Resilience Checklist’ for Queensland, and it will need further testing, development and learning as it is applied over the next year(s). The intended use is as a catalyst to support collaborations between Queensland State agencies and a range of other actors to: • check whether the methodological approaches and tools they are using are consistent with the practices that will be necessary to meet the challenges of climate change and other major disruptions; and • compare their practice, promoting learning across organisations as well as the opportunities to find gaps, duplications and synergies which could help to build collective impact. It can be used in many situations supporting government and non-government processes and initiatives across the state. For example, it could support the State-wide rollout of resilience strategies, and plan for deeper coordination of the climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and broader planning and investment initiatives for land use and infrastructure, and planning delivery of a range of social services in health, housing, etc. The mechanisms that could be used, and the types of governance arrangements that might support them are further discussed in the Narratives report (O'Connell et al., 2020).