Navigating collaborative governance: Network ignorance and the performative planning of South Australia's emergency management

This paper examines the roles for emergency and disaster risk management plans as policy artefacts that guide centralised governance networks. Past scholarship has been sceptical of the instrumental worth of these artefacts for informing and elaborating governance arrangements. Some suspect that such plans are purely symbolic devices, mere 'fantasy documents'. This paper examines the role of South Australia's state emergency management plan during the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020. The study provides confirmation of the symbolic utility of these plans for central government, while also providing evidence for some suggested difficulties with centralised emergency management networks, about which there is still limited empirical demonstration. Drawing on focus group and interview testimony from senior actors at strategic, tactical and operational levels of South Australia's emergency network, however, we also demonstrate instrumental-heuristic worth of these plans for network actors seeking to make sense of a continually changing bureaucratic landscape, and when reflecting on the value of the network in the aftermath of extreme events.

Automated summary

This paper examines the roles of emergency and disaster risk management plans in guiding centralized governance networks, providing evidence of their symbolic and instrumental-heuristic worth. Drawing on focus group and interview testimony from senior actors in South Australia's emergency network, the study confirms the symbolic utility of these plans for central government and demonstrates their usefulness for network actors in navigating a changing bureaucratic landscape and reflecting on the value of the network after extreme events.