Beyond Vulnerabilities, Intersecting Possibilities: Centring Multicultural Inclusion in Times of Converging Crises

Abstract (English)

Climate change is increasing the frequency, duration, and intensity of adverse events such as disease outbreaks, floods, fires, extreme heat, and violent storms(1). These events result in intersecting harms and costs, including loss of life, individual and social trauma, and disruption of structures of community integrity, health, and wellbeing(2). Managing these impacts is especially challenging in context of increasing migration flows and multicultural complexity, including insofar as emergency management authorities can no longer assume that the people they are trying to protect share the same language, cultural assumptions, or systems of knowledge. This growing problem of emergency-related knowledge translation and transfer is particularly acute in regional and remote communities where government policies have increasingly directed many new migrants—especially humanitarian migrants—towards settlement(3). Appropriate supports and specialised services such as interpreter services are often especially lacking or constrained in these contexts(4). Applied research is urgently needed to support improvement in the effectiveness of emergency knowledge communication to linguistically diverse groups, and especially for those from small Low Resource Language(LRL) groups.

It is largely left up to LRL communities to find an answer to the gaps they experience in information and access (5). The most affected will be in nations with Indigenous languages, and in nations with linguistic diversity as an integral part of society and economy. Australia, the site of the of the research explored in this paper, might be expected to be a leader in this respect. As a so-called ‘nation of migrants’, it includes people who speak more than 300 languages, 800 dialects, and come from more than 200 countries of birth. Furthermore, the rural and regional settlement of humanitarian migrants has been government policy for nearly three decades. It might be expected that diverse languages and cultures have become a significant part of emergency management plans for increasingly frequent health and climate-related emergencies. However, this has not been the norm for all language groups. Small language communities remain largely overlooked.

Drawing on 3 years of research with government officials, community organisations, and community members from LRL groups, this paper argues that strategic community-led innovation is essential to building effective and culturally appropriate communication channels, contextual information, and trust mechanisms in climate and health emergencies. Addressing this need and building on this recognition, this paper pays close attention to the lived experiences of multiculturalism, linguistic diversity and mobility of migrants from a range of linguistic communities. In doing so it aims to move beyond both both vulnerability models and ‘community resilience’ discourses, that either assume deficit or displace responsibility onto communities. This paper argues that taking such an approach will lead not only to better emergency preparedness, response, and recovery outcomes but also feed more broadly into positive social processes.