Climate change and disasters: The ethics of leadership

Abstract

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.

Rapid assessment of the biodiversity impacts of the 2019–2020 Australian megafires to guide urgent management intervention and recovery and lessons for other regions

“…For example, the fires have generated substantial interest in reinvigorating Indigenous fire practices and supporting Traditional Owners to integrate cultural burning into fire management planning and implementation frameworks (Robinson et al., 2021). In a world increasingly prone to ecological disasters, the government and non‐government conservation sector needs to reorganise itself, establishing structures and processes that can swing rapidly into action after ecological crises, accessing a substantially enhanced information base, whilst maintaining a culture of creativity and agility to accommodate unexpected events and impacts (Crosweller & Tschakert, 2020; Gustafsson et al., 2019; Lindenmayer et al., 2010).…”

Theorizing compassionate leadership from the case of Jacinda Ardern: Legitimacy, paradox and resource conservation

“…Compassionate leadership therefore remains undertheorized and under-researched (Shuck et al, 2019; Worline and Dutton, 2017), with Dutton et al (2014: 292) observing that “to date no systematic empirical studies address how leadership matters in terms of compassion at work”. More recently, Crosweller and Tschakert (2020: 2) noted that “concrete examples of caring and compassionate leadership remain scarce”.…”

Morals and climate decision-making: insights from social and behavioural sciences

“…Finally, research is beginning to explore how uncertainty and the prospects of irreversible loss create new types of moral judgements. Climate change creates unfamiliar situationsclimate shocks, climate change-related disasters, and uncertainty (Crosweller and Tschakert, 2020)-and new experiences of grief wrought by ecological loss (Barnett et al, 2016;Tschakert et al, 2017;Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018). Climate change decision-makers at all scales will increasingly make decisions in and about new and uncertain situations.…”

“…These findings highlight the implications of framing beyond targeting and aligning to individual moral foundations (section 2.1); moral frames may limit decision-maker's ability to interrogate interlinked causes of climate issues, and thereby narrow the range of possible solutions. For instance, leaders who are able to expand their remit of acceptable approaches to governing to include ethical elements like compassion and care, will be more successful in navigating transformation after disaster (Crosweller and Tschakert, 2020). Understanding the factors that impede decision-makers' abilities to act on their moral duties to constituents, and how framings of climate change at higher governance scale limit climate change options are important areas of future research.…”