Local Resilience Planning

Abstract

The history of local emergency planning is in many ways a combination of social, political and cultural inertia tied to a series of questions raised by particular geo-political circumstances, and grounded in both historical context and the requirements of civil defence and protection at different points in time. In Chapter 4 we highlighted that the local government tier has for many decades been given overall responsibility for managing emergencies. The CCA (2004) reinforced the key role of the local area as the key building block of resilience planning and emergency preparedness which aims to bring together a diverse range of national policy goals, legislative reforms and regional managers with local practitioners, in forms of governance partnership that have been largely successful. However, the variation in the adoption of the local resilience agenda, along with the range and speed with which ‘a state of readiness’ has been developed, is highly contingent itself on the relationships, previous experience and embedded practices — or lack thereof — in given localities.