LOCAL GOVERNMENT SUMMIT: There are few who know more about environmental governance than Michael Spencer, who is currently an adjunct senior research fellow at the Green Lab at the Monash University Business School – and a contributor to The Fifth Estate.
Speaking at The Fifth Estate’s Local Government, Net Zero and Resilient Communities Summit on 10 September – we are doing very badly when it comes to disaster resilience.
The main reason is that governing bodies are separating climate adaptation from climate disaster resilience.
“We have this absurd thing; if you go up to the national cabinet level, you have disaster resilience reporting in through one ministerial advisory council and adaptation through another – just ridiculous.
“We need to look at adaptation and disaster resilience as additive.”
While often mixed up, mitigation is what is being done to prevent climate impact, such as net zero initiatives, emission reduction and global targets, Spencer said. Adaptation is the change needed to manage climate impact through a locally determined lens.
“Hence we tend to talk about locally led adaptation.”
“What you don’t get with mitigation and adaptation is residual risk [which] becomes loss and damage.
The adaptation finance gap, he said, is between $187 and $339 billion for the world.
“We have a lack of adaptation plans, strategies and priorities, and where we do have them, they tend to go into a dead end.”
Spencer pointed to the NSW Reconstruction Authority recently starting the process for local adaptation plans and compared it with the ones Victoria did a few years ago, saying “we have a lovely set of adaptation plans sitting on the bookshelves” with “nothing happening, no money in the budget”.
Councils needed to have a deeper strategic understanding and better financing arrangements that go beyond “let’s wait for the next government grant and see what drops from heaven”.
“We all understand temperature rise, rainfall changes, sea level rise, and that’s just a starting point. You’ve got to work through the different layers to develop a deeper understanding.”
An example was the town of Shepparton, which is moving to drier temperatures, which would affect agriculture – which meant the town needs to shift its focus from horticulture to other forms of agriculture.
“[This] means you’ve got to start transforming the whole commercial support network within town, which means that you have workforce change to bring in skills. Higher temperature means you’ve got health impacts…you’re going to have mental health – these changes may not agree with the population.
“A whole range of cascading impacts needs to be considered in our planning, not just get stuck in the first column.”
Spencer referenced American Noble prize winning political scientist and economist Elinor Ostrom’s idea of “polycentric governance” as what needs to be achieved when bringing together different parties for decision making, that is underpinned by science and analysis.
During a consultation for Victoria’s Goulburn Broken Catchment, Spencer said he received feedback from the local community that said, “We’re dealing with federal governments. They want to give us short term funding that’s tied to certain things. That’s just not practical. We can’t make it work. They don’t give us the support we need, and they don’t even pass the laws that we need.
“If we had that, we could provide the local leadership, we could provide the collaborative governance of local government. We can strategise and establish priorities. We can communicate and engage [with] the community. We can develop programs and implement them, so there is a capability there.
“But they’re not working together.”
According to Spencer, the government should follow the “Bunnings” model, which saw “headquarters” serve as service centres to support stores in making money.
“It’s the same thing we’re talking about here, how does the state and federal government support local activity, not how do they prescribe what local areas need to do.”
“The constraints are essentially governance and finance. Governance is the overriding constraint around the world. Finance is the problem in Australia, [alongside] social and cultural issues.”
Completely behind in innovative projects
“We are stuck, really at tier one,” Spencer said. This included businesses as usual, capability, resources and management.
“We occasionally find some projects that duck into tier two where there might be revised policies, regulations and financing, but there are not many examples around Australia, or indeed the world.”
But the world needs to be pushed into tier three, which embodies major changes or paradigm shifts, Spencer said. These included changes to institutions, laws, financing, and governance. “A lot of adaptation works we need to push into that tier.”
The numbers paint a horrifying image of underfunding
“I was looking at the mid north coast floods from May this year, and it tells me that those 12 LGAs (local government areas) that were flood declared, they’re all doing fine –they’re either high disaster resilience or moderate disaster resilience.
“Five people died, 10,000 properties were destroyed, and 1000 were destroyed, no, you’re not going to convince me. The point here is that there are capabilities, but it’s not happening.”
In a survey by the NSW government for the State of the NSW Public Sector Report 2020, only 50 per cent of LGAs in the state responded, Spencer said, and adaptation was a high priority in 44 per cent of metropolitan LGAs, but only 26 per cent of regional LGAs where the problem happens.
“The survey found that adaptation actions were generally only resourced through grants from other levels of government. Sometimes they haven’t even got the skills and capabilities to apply for money.
“For most, there’s generally insufficient funding, staff and capabilities to undertake action, and as a result, there’s little correlation between the LGA being impacted by climate related events and progress on action.”
Barriers
Spencer said the barriers were a lack of funding, a lack of staff, inconsistent approaches by the government, a lack of capabilities, and uncertainty about the role of local government.
A colleague in Tasmania recently told him that he had just suddenly decided, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do climate change work anymore, we’re going to pull anything that’s happening in that space.’
According to Spencer, there were no legal obligations for councils to participate in climate resilience other than to protect their assets. So, councils will often leave it to the legal standing and agencies to take serious action.
And what needs to happen for these councils is to receive funding, education in understanding costs and benefits, leadership within local government and the involvement of external partner organisations.
“When I looked at those 12 LGAs from the mid north coast floods, seven of those 12 LGAs were in the top 25 for New South Wales for disaster declarations, but only two were in the top 25 for funding, and they were right down the bottom.
“If you add up the amount of DRF (disaster resilience fund) those 12 LGAs received…all 12 of them would still come in seventh.”
“So, the funding that is available, it’s not evident that it’s going to places where it’s needed the most.”
For example, Spencer said, Victoria is not allocating money for adaptation in its infrastructure spend, because managers are reluctant to use resources for climate risk and adaptation “if there’s not going to be any results.”
Inconsistent attitudes in governance
Recently, the Reconstruction Authority has released guidelines for adaptation planning, and the bottom line was that if councils need money after doing the work, they’ll have to go through the process of going through the cabinet expenditure review committee.
This issue of governance is worth keeping in mind, he said.
“We need to remember that different forms of governance bring with them different attitudes, so if we look at state and federal government, it’s very hierarchical; it’s command and control, it’s expert-centred; ‘we are the experts and therefore we know best’, it’s quite condescending.
“If you look at markets, it’s very business trade and exchange focused, focused on physical exchange.
“But if you go into community level, network type governance, it’s based on shared values and commitment. It can often be emotionally centered and built around those civil society networks.
It’s an oil and water problem, Spencer said, and we can’t assume that hierarchical government can mix with local networks; it takes a lot to make it work.
And there are lots of resources on the things you need to do to achieve locally led adaptation governance.
It’s a time element that you need to build as you go – a concept seen in ISO standards.
“It’s assess, impact, plan, implement, monitor, value, but around the outside they talk about raising awareness and ambition.
“You don’t expect on day one that you’ll have the level of engagement, but if you go around this loop a couple of times and you do a good job, then you will start to bring in the multi stakeholder engagement that you’re going to need to deliver outcomes. And you’re going to build skills and capacities in setting priorities in developing action plans, in implementing those plans, and reviewing those plans.”
And this is a time-based process, not a one-off, Spencer said. “We’ve got to think about how we build all that around these core elements that aren’t rocket science.”
Finance opportunities
Councils need to think of financial opportunities beyond the next government grant.
For example, California uses enhanced infrastructure financing districts starting in 2015, a form of tax increment financing, where the council lends to itself with the expectation that it will collect extra taxes from properties that will benefit from an increase in land value from the public asset.
The city further developed climate resilience districts to help local governments. These concepts are widely used in the United States.
The focus areas are the big triangle that’s needed
There is an opportunity to bring together different LGAs around an impact area, and here’s the “triangle” needed to bring the councils together.
First is building the council’s skills and ability to understand science and technology, the capacity and capability for risk analysis, data analysis, project evaluation, governance, finance, monitoring and evaluation. Spencer said the National Risk Assessment, [since released], would “unload a whole truck of data towards local government.”
“But how many local governments are able to manage and use it to put into a risk plan?”
Polycentric governance
The next step is building a polycentric governance to decide priorities, implementation, receive and pay money, liaise with government and expert institutions to implement the global adaptation framework.
And lastly, it links it to finance, whether it’s government, private, blended value opportunities, or tax incremental financing.
“Going forward, there’s a lot we can do, but we need to think in terms of institutions that can be purpose built; we need to think of how we develop the local institutions to lead it, we need to think of different financing models, blended financing models, building regional skills and capabilities, building collaboration and trust, thinking systemically.
“And do NSW joint organisations maybe provide a basis for going forward?”
Read more about this on Pat Whitford’s dive into the work of a joint organisation.
