Community-led co-design in disaster recovery: Enabling conditions for practice

Using a case study involving residents, First Nations communities and local organisations, this paper explores how community-led co-design was enacted in local recovery across four wildfire-affected regions in Australia. It develops an empirically grounded framework for understanding and cultivating the cultural-discursive, social-political, affective-emotional and material-economic conditions through which community-led co-design can function as a form of participatory governance. A distinctive finding of the action research was that, while communities and researchers co-designed and trialled an operational community-led resilience planning-to-granting process, simply inviting communities to co-design recovery priorities and actions was not in itself sufficient to enable genuine community leadership.

The findings show that meaningful co-design depended on the intentional creation of the enabling conditions that underpin genuine community agency. More than a participatory method, co-design became a relational governance practice through which communities negotiated trust, authority, legitimacy, accountability, and collective action. In this way, community-led co-design strengthened communities’ longer-term capacity and confidence to collectively navigate and respond to future challenges. The paper contributes empirical and conceptual insights by identifying the conditions that enabled shifting co-design from a participatory method to an approach to relational governance. It offers practical guidance for researchers, agencies and communities seeking to support locally grounded, community-led and self-determined recovery and resilience.