Conditions for Effective Coproduction in Community-Led Disaster Risk Management

This paper reports on a case study of collective coproduction in an Australian community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) project called “Be Ready Warrandyte”. The first goal of the case study was to understand what interactions and power-sharing between citizens and government “looked and felt like” in a significant example of community-led CBDRM in an Australian context. Its second, broader goal was to test the extent to which foundational coproduction theory, specifically four conditions proposed by Elinor Ostrom for enabling coproduction that is more effective than either government or citizen production alone, can explain the citizen-government interactions, roles and contributions that enable successful community-led CBDRM. The study confirms that each of the four conditions—complementarity, authority, incentives and credible commitment—also apply to community-led as well as government-led initiatives. It reinforces the central importance of complementarity for avoiding offloading of risk, responsibility and cost to citizens from government, while also suggesting that specific sources of internal and external authority, incentives, and credible commitment are especially important when coproduction is community-led. It identifies leadership and its impacts on government-citizen relationships and power-sharing in coproduction as an important area that needs further research.