Renewing Christchurch

Making sense of it from a distance

After tragedy, life is transformed.  Existing plans, hopes and expectations are unhinged.  With loss, especially untimely loss, comes an unmapped corner on the path through life, leading to a future that can only look bleak by comparison with what went before. 

But for all sorts of reasons – friends, family, the will to survive, perhaps only instinct – you move on even through deep grief and despair.  Slowly, and despite a natural belief that maybe life doesn’t make that much sense any more, you learn to live a new one.  Time doesn’t really heal and the idea of closure is simply an attempt – usually by others – to distance tragedy that won't ever go away.  But we can learn to live with a new and sorrow-tinged reality.

As it is with individuals, so it must be with communities. 

Christchurch has turned a corner that was never seen, never planned.  The press is talking recovery, but these early days are the days of individuals plumbing the depths and a community sharing the despair.

It might feel too early to think about the future in this awful present.  But keeping moving is how we survive the grief. 

Kobe 1995

My attention was recently drawn to the way in which Kobe was rebuilt after the disastrous Hanshin earthquake of 1995.  The scale of the Kobe quake was unimaginable, even by Christchurch standards.

Kobe 1995 – Some figures

6,400 people killed, 15,000 injured

400,000 buildings damaged, 100,000 collapsed completely

200,000 housing units were partially or completely destroyed

85% of schools, many hospitals, and other major public facilities sustained heavy damage.

Widespread damage to water, gas, and sewer system, rail, road, and port facilities

845,000 households lost gas service for as long as 2.5 months

Restoration of water and wastewater systems to nearly 1.27 million households took as long as 4 months in some places

2,000 small and medium sized businesses failed

1995 Kobe Earthquake 10-year Retrospective Risk Management Solutions

Being told about others’ experiences doesn’t make your own grief easier. But it does tell you that life goes on. And it can offer lessons on how that might happen.

For example, rebuilding is inevitably long and slow.  Rushing into renewal is not an option.  Putting together lifelines is a drawn out process.  A city less vulnerable will take research, analysis, and thinking through. 

So the early urgency lies in providing a quality of temporary shelter and restoring fundamental services that may need to provide for years rather than months.

It is appropriate for a strong lead – and funding – for this to come from the very top given the enormity of this disaster, for the Cabinet and the government to work closely with the civic leaders of Christchurch through this time of rescue and restoration.

Among other things, we may just have to rewrite last year's National Infrastructure Plan even before the ink is dry, demonstrating statecraft by a capacity to rethink the country’s spending priorities and to focus now on the billions that must be directed towards Christchurch.

A time for civic renewal

David Edgington drew lessons from Kobe in his recent book Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography of Crisis and Opportunity (March 2010).  Among other things, planners were challenged by local citizens who felt vulnerable and disempowered following the earthquake. They had to win back community trust through local consultation especially among those facing the complete transformation of their neighbourhoods.

What disaster and recovery can do is meld communities, creating new relationships between the people and the governors.  Civil life comes to the fore, with strong, inclusive government action supported by widespread volunteerism.

It seems appropriate for civic leaders to take a lead in looking beyond recovery to renewal in Christchurch.  But it is equally important that the long-term is not contained – or constrained – in a rushed-out plan. Let’s hope that the earthquake is not seized on by planners as an opportunity for a super-sized urban development project. 

The people of Christchurch will need to be consulted widely, to play an active part in decisions about how their future will be reshaped and their communities renewed.  And that should happen bit by bit, project by project, street by street, suburb by suburb.

Whatever comes out of Christchurch's renewal, let us hope that like Kobe it is inspired by a stronger sense of community, and a heightened level of trust between councils, their constituents, and the development sector.

Subsidiarity: putting civil society in its place

Communities doing their own thing

An article in today’s New Zealand Herald reported on the progress being made by a voluntary association of residents of the Matakana area developing local walkways.  Businesses, residents, and donors have pitched in to work with council support to create off-highway links between the rural settlements of Matakana Village, Point Wells, and Omaha Beach.  This is a modest local initiative.  It is a sign, though, of increasing community interest in the quality and accessibility of the physical environment outside our cities.  The Tawharanui Open Sanctuary Society is in the same vein (and locality).  Here, a local community voluntary initiative has been encouraged and supported by local government (the regional council) to achieve conservation outcomes. 

This is a sign that working together communities can deliver projects with a public benefit.  They do not need simply to join the queues contesting government delivery of taxpayer funded projects.

Volunteering, the foundation of civil society

Of course, community focused voluntarism has been with us for a long time, especially in urban areas.  The Māori Warden Association is an excellent example we are all familiar with in New Zealand.  The NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations includes around 130 member organisations, which among them employ 11,000 paid staff and represent 41,500 volunteers. The Federation is committed to building strong and equitable communities.

Volunteering New Zealand is an organisation that provides resources and support to organisations in emergency services, health, welfare, education, culture, faith based services, community support, ethnic interests, sport and recreation, conservation, special interests, advocacy and international volunteering.  It provides a strong framework of volunteering centres throughout the country. It  estimates that around 34% of the population aged over ten years is involved in volunteering. 

A high rate of volunteering is confirmed by recent research by Massey University and the Ministry of Social Development.  This puts New Zealand number seven among nations when measured as the share of the economically active population in the not-for-profit workforce.

This is all evidence that New Zealand enjoys a strong civil society, made up of the range of organisations and associations of individuals (and businesses) that contribute freely to the effective functioning of communities without relying on the strictures of the state to do so. 

Civil society, the state, and the market

Civil society has long played a role in getting underprivileged communities moving in developing nations.  For them it may be the main means of group survival, and a force against anarchy.  Often non-government organisations arise from the ground up and become important organising agencies for infrastructure and services in poor communities which depend more on social capital than state direction and resources.  

Now, it seems, civil society may have a more visible role to play as developed nations move into a new, fiscally challenged phase of slow growth and development.

An active civil society can underpin social progress and build stronger communities, ideally supported by the state.  Even better, civil society, the state, and commercial organisations (those regulated by the market) can come together to achieve beneficial social and economic outcomes.  

It’s interesting that a growing awareness of the potential of civil society has triggered some rethinking even in conservative quarters.  Think Tank Res Publica with its emphasis on a more inclusive form of democracy has informed the British government’s thinking about new ways of advancing the social programme, ways less dependent on welfare and more on capacity building. 

There is a risk that moving more towards a society based on voluntarism is no more than a means of running down central government, undoing hard-fought for welfare programmes.  Some equate it with inserting the market where the state has traditionally operated. But this thinking risks confusing the elevation of civil society with corporatisation of services that no longer fit comfortably into the state’s mandate. 

Sure, the relationship between state, civil society and the market needs to be debated.  But that should not prevent us exploring what is potentially a much more effective and balanced form of government (and governance) in which communities, business, and governments act in partnership.

Subsidiarity – a better form of governance?

I have recently been involved in a project looking at subsidiarity in Lombardy (population 9.9m ) in northern Italy.  Subsidiarity is the principle that responsibilities for governing should be allocated from central to decentralised agencies wherever practical.  This is the vertical subsidiarity that features in much of the literature about democracy and governance.  The rationale is that decisions are best taken as close as possible to where they will have most effect.  This arrangement helps communities relate to different tiers of government while providing for more effective governance.

In Lombardy the related principle of horizontal subsidiarity is also important.  This sees functions allocated to the agencies most suited to implementing them.  These may be voluntary or commercial organisations.  Functions that have traditionally been the role of government might move out under these circumstances.  It goes without saying that if the government does allocate responsibility to an outside agency it needs to be accompanied by public funding and monitoring to ensure the best return on the taxpayer investment.  The point is, though, that government need not take direct responsibility for delivery  to get the best outcome.

A suggestion: endorsing subsidiarity in the constitution

Built on our strong and growing civil society, an established and transparent market place, and sound agencies of government, the forthcoming review of the New Zealand constitution might consider vertical and horizontal subsidiarity as potential governing principles, and in doing so acknowledge and endorse the growing importance of community-based organisations in future New Zealand governments.

Whither local democracy?

Central Government Retains its Hold

The Minister of Local Government is reported in the New Zealand Herald to be considering establishing a committee of Cabinet with the power to make decisions over Auckland matters.  This echoes a suggestion by the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance.  It emerges though at this last minute as yet another in a series of convoluted arrangements made in response to the contested decision-making that has been a feature of local governance Auckland.

The reason for this proposal is that the new Auckland Council will have to deal with a large range of government departments.  But so does every other council.  Perhaps the real problem is that the new arrangements reveal the fragmentation of central government.  If so, why the special treatment for Auckland?  While it is by far the biggest local council that government has to deal with, that does not mean that Auckland’s problems are necessarily more complex than those of councils elsewhere.  In fact, consolidation into a unitary council was meant to have strengthened local capacity to deal with any issues that might be holding back the region’s development.

Coupled with the way in which the Minister has stage-managed the implementation of reform, from the time he issued a brief government response – Making Auckland Greater – usurping the Commission’s tome, through the appointment of the transition agency and the local government commissioner, to the three Acts of Parliament defining the structure of the new council, this reform has been driven from Wellington.  Appointments to the boards of the Council Controlled Organisations responsible for infrastructure and network services were also made by the Minister.  And now it has been announced that both the Minister and Prime Minister are addressing the inaugural meeting of the new council, something that journalist Brian Rudman suggests is “intimidating”.

Wellington in Auckland

Certainly, scale means Auckland’s economic performance makes it a focus of government attention.  But this was addressed in 2005 by the establishment of the Government Urban and Economic Development Office (GUEDO).  This included personnel from the Ministries of Economic Development, Transport, Environment, and the Department of Labour (DOL) “to achieve greater alignment of Government priorities and effort towards sustainable urban and economic development of the Auckland region”. 

The office joined the frenzy of reporting and caucusing about Auckland’s economic development, working closely with the Auckland Regional Council on a series of projects aimed at defining the “Auckland problem” and finding ways of resolving it. The results are not yet obvious as the region has continued to underperform the rest of the country in terms of employment growth, most evident in a 3.6% contraction between February 2008 and February 2009, compared with 2.3% for the rest of the country.

In 2010, joining the spirit of reform that took over the region, GUEDO changed its name to the Auckland Policy Office to reflect a “broader role in developing and implementing government policy in Auckland”.  Today central government’s Auckland Policy Office incorporates the Departments of Internal Affairs, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Building and Housing, Treasury, the State Services Commission, the Ministries of Social Development and Culture and Heritage, the Securities Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency. Only a minority of these departments have staff in the Auckland office.  However, the APO is overseen by a committee of the departmental chief executives, suggesting that there should already be an appreciation in Wellington of Auckland issues and coordinated departmental positions on how to respond to Auckland initiatives.  What more do we need?

Another sign of Wellington’s growing presence in Auckland is the growth in central government administration in the region, with the numbers up by 60% over the past decade, to 6,100 compared with 4,710 in local government. (These figures do not include employees within operative services, including hospitals, schools, or water supply).  Even the central government bureaucracy in Wellington did not grow at such a rate, although it still managed to expand employment by 47% over a decade in which the capital’s total employment only grew by 17%.

Structural Change and Contested Decision-Making

One thread behind the creation of one council was the difficulty in getting agreement on major infrastructure projects – the region’s debate over and consequent rejection of the central government’s proposal to turn a large area of the waterfront into a rugby stadium being the obvious example.  Yet even after reform it seems that Auckland’s capacity to make its own decisions will still ride heavily on central government advice, agenda, and approval.  

But by raising the contestability of regional decisions to the national level, is there any guarantee of better outcomes for Auckland and Aucklanders?

Delivering on a Community Mandate

At least the “almost-local” ward electoral system and the creation of local boards in the new arrangement has created an opportunity for communities to be heard, and for this concession we should be grateful.  As it is, the representative system first time around was not to be denied, with a community-grounded platform prevailing in the mayoral election.  It remains to be seen how far the Mayor, Len Brown, can marry a community mandate with a structure in which economic rationality was intended to prevail.  And how far central government will support this, the local electorates’ preference, remains an unknown.

So in Auckland how far the representative system will deliver local democracy depends, still, on the leaning of a minority (if popular) mayor, and on central government designs.  Commentators watch with anticipation the capacity of our new mayor and council to deliver, and to deliver quickly, if they are to survive the next election. There is not much new in this.  It is how electoral politics works.

However, for local democracy to be truly and consistently served, it may be that the best form of governance comes from empowering communities to assist with decisions and, even more, perhaps, to deliver them. With the removal of physical infrastructure services and economic initiative to CCOs, the time might be ripe for a community development mandate to be addressed.  This can be done as much through developing the capacity of communities to implement what they want and not simply to define it. 

The issue may not be so much of what can we give communities, Mr Mayor, but how can we help our communities to serve themselves? This is a long way from the model imposed from the centre, but not beyond the reach of a new Auckland.  It is the way to true local democracy which perhaps, just perhaps, the new arrangements have opened up.  The alternative is to be looking always over our shoulder at central government.