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Climate change, extreme events, and related disasters pose significant challenges not only for the poorest and most vulnerable populations, but also for leaders in disaster and emergency management. Effective leadership entails preparing for and responding to increasing intensities and frequencies of extreme natural hazard events while managing and justifying suffering and loss that communities and individuals experience in case of failed protection. Insight is provided into this double challenge and how it is compounded by the concomitant ways modern societies engage with risk and construct vulnerability and resilience. A conceptual framework is used to show how the rise of modernity, today's risk society, neoliberalism, and governmentality as found in many western democracies, converge to constrain disaster leadership and management, illustrating how interpretations of responsibility and potential loss and suffering have shifted from organizations to individual actors, exacerbating the leadership dilemma in managing hazard-driven crises. This includes ways that neoliberal governmentality warp understandings of vulnerability and resilience by understating one and overstating the other. Through a heuristic, we explain mounting leadership challenges with increasing levels of disaster intensity and consequence, drawing upon natural hazard examples from Australia.

PurposeThere are many pragmatic challenges and complex interactions in the reduction of systemic disaster risk. No single agency has the mandate, authority, legitimacy or resources to fully address the deeper socio-economic, cultural, regulatory or political forces that often drive the creation and transfer of risk. National leadership and co-ordination are key enablers. This paper shares Australia's progress in building an enabling environment for systemic disaster risk reduction, and specifically how a change in thinking and resolve to work differently is beginning to shape nation-wide reforms and national programs of work.Design/methodology/approachThe project and program of work adopted an inclusive, collaborative, co-design and co-production approach, working with diverse groups to create new knowledge, build trust, ongoing learning and collective ownership and action. Values- and systems-based approaches, and ethical leadership were core aspects of the approach.FindingsCo-creating a more comprehensive and shared understanding of systemic disaster risk, particularly the values at risk and tensions and trade-offs associated with the choices about how people prevent or respond, has contributed to a growing shift in the way disasters are conceptualised. New narratives about disasters as “unnatural” and the need for shared responsibilities are shaping dialogue spaces and policy frameworks. The authors’ experience and ongoing learning acknowledge pragmatic challenges while also providing evidence-based ideas and guidance for more systems and transformative styles and competencies of leadership that are needed for convening in contested and complex environments.Practical implicationsThis work built networks, competencies and generated ongoing momentum and learning. The lessons, evidence and reports from the work continue to be accessed and influential in research, emergency management and disaster mitigation practices (e.g. engagement, communications, training) and policy. Most significantly, the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework provides the basis, justification and guidance for the nation's policy reform agenda around disaster risk reduction and is catalysing national efforts in developing a national action plan and systemic measurement, evaluation and learning to ensure the realisation of disaster risk reduction priorities.Originality/valueA practical example is offered of a nation actively learning to navigate the governance challenges and implement strategies to address the reduction of complex, systemic risks.

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