Community-Led Disaster Resilience: Integrating Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Participatory Governance in Fire and Flood-Affected Australian Communities

Context 

Australia's 2019-2020 megafires exposed fundamental challenges in conventional disaster management approaches. Fire to Flourish (2022-2025) was an action research program working with affected communities to address systemic barriers preventing communities from leading their own resilience efforts: top-down governance that excludes local decision-making, chronic under-investment in regional systems, and structural disadvantages that compound disaster impacts. The five-year program tested whether community-led approaches could enable transformative resilience by addressing root causes of vulnerability and building on community strengths.

What we did

Fire to Flourish partnered with over 50 communities in four regional local government areas through locally embedded community teams. Participatory action research and co-design positioned communities as transdisciplinary partners. Across more than 20 community-led processes, communities co-designed resilience priorities, projects, and participatory governance, including decision-making structures, culturally safe and trauma-informed ways of working, and accessible communication and support.

Community-led participatory grantmaking shifted decision power directly to community members, enabling them to set priorities and allocate over $10 million (AUD) (€5.8 million) in flexible funding to community-led projects according to their needs. The program deliberately employed and remunerated community members, recognising local knowledge as essential expertise and acknowledging consultation fatigue.

Central to the approach was foregrounding Indigenous knowledge and ways of being through the Australian Aboriginal concept of Caring for Country, a holistic and relational practice encompassing care for lands, waters, people, culture and community. Caring for Country as a knowledge system and governance practice shares principles of Indigenous resource management traditions globally. Positioning people as inseparable from Country, it integrates ecological stewardship and human wellbeing through practices such as cultural burning that have guided Aboriginal land management for millennia. Within Fire to Flourish, Caring for Country guided shared values and governance principles, providing a practical pathway for Aboriginal leadership and cultural protocols to shape co-design and participatory decision-making.

Community Outcomes

The participatory processes revealed significant existing community strengths, including deep local knowledge and the capacity to self-organise and coordinate. They strengthened relationships, created new networks, and enhanced organisational capabilities. Caring for Country emerged as important to collective decision-making across both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants. As one of the community-identified priorities, it was reflected in a significant subset of the more than 200 community-led projects funded, including Aboriginal ranger programmes, cultural burning initiatives, emergency preparedness and social infrastructure. 

What we learnt 

Community-led disaster resilience requires fundamental systems change across three interconnected areas. First, governance structures must shift from exclusionary, top-down models to collaborative frameworks enabling genuine community decision-making power. Second, place-based approaches tailored to local context are essential; implementation must be co-designed with communities, and include culturally grounded governance and accessible processes. Third, local knowledge and lived experience constitute critical expertise systematically missing from disaster response, resilience and climate adaptation. Indigenous knowledge and governance systems, such as Caring for Country, offer proven, practice-based approaches for integrating ecological stewardship and social wellbeing before and after disasters. Enabling community-led resilience requires long-term, flexible funding responsive to community needs, sustained presence to build trust, partnerships and appropriate support structures, whilst maintaining community ownership.