Disruption and resilience: How organisations coped with the Canterbury earthquakes

Erica Seville, Joanne Stevenson, Charlotte Brown, Sonia Giovinazzi, John Vargo, December 2014

ERI Research Report 2014/002

Introduction

Within an economy, businesses, governments and community service providers are the actors-on-the-ground that experience the direct and indirect impacts of infrastructure failures. They are the actors whose responses, decisions, and adaptive behaviours collectively shape the path of economic recovery and patterns of growth and decline. Examining the responses of public and private organisations to major disruptions provides important insights into how local and regional economies fare in the aftermath of these events. This report presents key findings from a study conducted by Resilient Organisations as part of the Economics of Resilient Infrastructure (ERI) project. The research presented here examines how organisations in Canterbury, New Zealand were impacted by a complex series of earthquakes; how they mitigated those disruptions and recovered their productive capacity; and the ways in which they adapted to facilitate continued and, in some cases, improved functioning.

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