Building cross-sector recovery collaborations after Australian bushfires: the importance of embracing and linking diverse capitals and capacities

The literature on disaster management highlights that communities that mobilise and integrate a range of local capacities, resources and knowledges tend to fare best. This demonstrates the critical, yet underappreciated, role these attributes play in disaster management. This paper contributes to scholarship by examining the conditions, values and practices for building effective cross-sector ties. Importantly, it highlights the need for decentralised, cross-sector supports for building community recovery (increasingly known as ‘polycentric’ disaster governance). It reports on the results of a local community engagement program after country-wide bushfires in Australia (2019–20). Participatory action planning is used in two regional communities and ethnographic methods are employed to glean the experience and learnings from local recovery workers (n = 5). Findings support calls for embracing and linking diverse capacities post-disaster to boost social capital and invest in local knowledges. Focus is given to bonding, bridging and linking capital, the importance of capacity ‘redundancy’, and the role of trust, serendipity, and ‘culture brokers’ in identifying, mobilising and integrating diverse capacities and resources to support community-centered disaster recovery. Findings are used to fine-tune understandings of cross-sector ties that enable communities to move beyond a passive stance.