Developing a National-Level Intercity Resilience-Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Network for New Zealand

With the continual increase in frequency and magnitude of disaster events experienced around the globe, building disaster resilience in communities, cities, and countries is a priority. Many governments are now focusing on building resilience in cities to make them better equipped against natural disasters. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015–2030 promotes enabling cities at the national level to become better equipped and more resilient to disasters caused by natural hazards. The SFDRR encourages collaboration and sharing of knowledge, expertise, lessons learned, and best practices between cities at the national and international levels as a promising resilience-building pathway. Consequently, the past decade has seen the development of several international resilience knowledge-sharing and collaboration networks, such as the 100 Resilient Cities pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Making Cities Resilient programme launched by the United Nations. Despite the acknowledged benefits of resilience-knowledge sharing and collaboration between cities at the international level, national-level resilience-knowledge-sharing and collaboration networks remain under-studied. There is a lack of literature on the criteria and methods for developing national-level intercity resilience-knowledge-sharing and collaboration networks. This research responds to the questions: Why develop a national-level intercity resilience-knowledge-sharing and collaboration network? What factors should be considered during developing a national-level intercity resilience-knowledge-sharing and collaboration network? and How can a national-level intercity resilience-knowledge-sharing and collaboration network be developed? Using New Zealand as a case study, cities and resilience practitioners were involved from the early stages of the study to identify the network-design criteria and the optimum/preferred operational requirements, ensuring the practicality and operability of the research outcomes. The research adopted an exploratory sequential research design comprising three phases. Phase 1 involved a qualitative approach with a purposive sample of New Zealand cities. Phase 1 revealed the objectives, the influencing criteria and engagement modules, the optimum knowledge-transfer mechanisms, and the criteria influencing the selection of resilience-collaboration partners from among the network members. Phase 2 involved designing a survey instrument based on the findings from Phase 1, to test the acceptability and operability of the Phase 1 findings on a nationwide scale with the rest of the New Zealand cities and local authorities. Phase 3 involved a final consultation survey with international subject matter experts, which also served as a basis for the international transferability of the findings. The study revealed several advantages and uses for developing a national-level intercity resilience network, including collaboration, knowledge sharing, standardisation of resilience approaches and assessment methods, learning from research, enhancing relationships, collective advocacy, effecting legislation, and funding acquisition. The research also identified that developing a national-level intercity resilience-knowledge-sharing and collaboration network should consider two categories; the first is a structural and management category for criteria such as the structure of the resilience network, how the cities are connected, the extent of control on direct communication between the cities, and affiliation of the network to a bigger network. The other category is a facilitation and performance category which includes criteria such as setting time-targeted goals and deliverables for the cities to achieve, content moderation, and publicising the network activities. The findings identified that effective knowledge-sharing for resilience between cities requires a balance of implicit- and explicit-knowledge types and needs to facilitate different knowledge-sharing formats due to the diverse and complex nature of the resilience knowledge. The optimum resilience network was identified as one that would operate both physical and virtual interaction modules, with different knowledge-sharing mechanisms and tools involved in each case. The findings of this research present a guideline for developing a national-level intercity resilience-knowledge-sharing network. For cities that opt to engage in bilateral collaboration with other network members, the study revealed that the similarity of hazards, geographic proximity, the similarity of resources and priorities, high resilience performance, similarity of city size and demographics, previous relationships, willingness to collaborate, and similar economic drivers are critical criteria that influence the decision-making processes for the selection of the most suitable resilience collaboration partners. The thesis provides a detailed roadmap to guide cities and aid in informing their resilience-collaboration-partner selection decision-making process.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Civil & Environmental Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Elkhidir, Elrasheid Mohamed Abdalla

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mannakkara, Sandeeka

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/64591

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/64591