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In the last year, hundreds of climate emergency declarations have been made by local and national governments around the world. Instigated through grassroots activism, these declarations have become a focus of aspirations for radical climate action. However, concerns have also raised been about the desirability of emergency declarations in responding to the climate crisis, including at a local scale. In this paper we consider the enactment of emergency declarations by two local government authorities in Aotearoa New Zealand that have recent experience with multiple crises. Drawing on in-depth interviews with activists, councillors and officials, our findings show that adopting the ‘international language’ of climate emergency can be a source of hope but also tension. In particular, we highlight the struggle of local practitioners to overlay an emergency approach, something that is already contested in response to sudden onset disasters, with the scale, complexity and temporality of climate change. Our analysis suggests that retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis at the local scale has the potential to reproduce status quo politics, and calls for a greater understanding of the diversity of approaches to emergency in climate politics.

Recent years have seen growing interest in enabling volunteers to play a more pronounced role in disaster response, and yet efforts to systematically analyse this crisis volunteer action, particularly among young people, have been surprisingly limited. This study examines the case of the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) in Aotearoa New Zealand, a student-led group which over the space of a decade has responded to multiple disasters, including earthquakes, floods, fires, a terrorist attack and the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews, our analysis compares the practices adopted by the SVA in response to these different crises and identifies how members and supporters of the group have come to understand its capabilities, limitations, and conditions for effective operation. We present a framework of cross-cutting lessons of “why”, “who”, “when”, “what” and “how” and demonstrate the ways they have been built upon for each new disaster mobilisation. In distilling, the key lessons of a youth-led crisis volunteer group that has mobilised for a spectrum of disasters, this paper contributes to theoretical understandings of how groups at a local level learn after sequential disasters, and the conditions and considerations that enable such groups to effectively—and repeatedly—“meet a need” in disaster response.

The question of who is included, or who is excluded, from environmental governance arrangements is at the heart of debates of institutional legitimacy. The recent redefinition of representation as a claim to 'speak for' another provides an opportunity to re-examine the inclusiveness of environmental governance arrangements. This article builds on these developments by empirically evaluating the inclusiveness of three representative claims embedded in freshwater governance in Canterbury since 2002. The contribution argues that accounts of environmental governance must consider implicit forms of representation that can exclude or marginalise and raises some caveats relating to expansion of network governance.

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