What was your role at CERA?

 

Primarily, it involved setting up the Canterbury Wellbeing Index and the CERA Wellbeing Survey. I also did a youth wellbeing survey and surveyed the red zone property owners who had chosen to settle with the Crown. We published that survey in early 2016 and then CERA folded in April 2016. I was also involved in, but not leading, the red zone programme. I went along to a lot of the meetings with red zone residents when the offer was made, as note-taker, facilitator, general sort of body. I was one of the people who made the phone calls to red zone residents who were categorized as orange, where people were in a temporary state of uncertainty until further geotech work was done. So it was at that community-facing level, but I also supported the psycho-social programme, and how the strategy around social recovery was formulated and managed.

 

I came into CERA about three or four months after it was established, about November 2011. There were only about 50 people at that point. I reported to Michelle Mitchell who was an amazing leader in the social recovery area. We had about five programmes of work. One was the red zoning, led by Ivan Iafeta; there was a housing recovery programme led by David Griffith; psycho-social wellbeing or community resilience led by Denise Kidd. And then there was work that I led as GM for social and cultural outcomes monitoring. But I was also Michelle's deputy chief executive advisor, so I was an advisor and a GM at the same time. A lot of the work I did was in that monitoring framework. We did the Canterbury Wellbeing Index as a collaboration across maybe 30 agencies, trying to get existing data to track things like effects on educational outcomes, anxiety medication prescriptions. We had huge support from Wellington: it was a really enabling environment.

 

We established an outcomes framework at the start, based off one that social sector agencies had developed in Wellington. At that time social sector agencies were being instructed to work together to develop a framework so there was less duplication. We took that outcomes framework and tailored it for this purpose. But the data didn't really tell us about what people were thinking or feeling, so we set up the CERA Wellbeing Survey. It was a collaboration with Council because they already had a Quality of Life Survey. It covered Christchurch, and Selwyn and Waimakariri Districts. A really important partner for us was the public health people, and after CERA folded, Public Health picked it up and continues to produce it as the Canterbury Wellbeing Survey and Index. It now has amazing longevity, but with more of a health focus, whereas the CERA work was more around things like social connectedness.

 

What sort of engagement work were you involved with?

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One of the things we learned from Dr. Rob Gordon, the Australian psychologist who  worked on the bushfires in Australia, was how a lot of people were really struggling with processing normal day-to-day life. We brought him over every year to talk to communities. What he said is that in your normal life you have a routine and time to reflect, but when you're in a state of constant anxiety and challenge, your cortisol's up and you don't get that background processing time to just mull things over. Maybe your house gets repaired, but mentally you're not in a great space. We took a lot of that information and turned it into data in our wellbeing survey. We were very deliberate about breakdowns: we had demographic breakdowns for people with disabilities, low incomes, young people, renters, Māori and Pasifika. We had culturally and linguistically diverse groups, so we could look at which parts of the population were most affected.

 

One of the things I used to talk about at conferences was an emerging group of people, women who were having to pick up a lot with the mental load around the changes in day-to-day life. Men were getting quite angry, feeling like they should be able to solve the problems related to their house, but they were stuck. So women were dealing with that, but also with their insurance claim, maybe their elderly parents' insurance claim, plus their children changing schools. So we spent a lot of time thinking how to intervene to support the wider population who probably have never sought social service support.

 

It was an incredibly stressful time. There'd be these big town hall meetings and there would be a lot of upset and annoyed people; we'd have to go with security. We always had some sort of support there, trying to pull people away who were visibly upset to have a one-to-one. Often Roger [Sutton, CEO of CERA] would talk, they'd have the guy from a geotech company and people in the audience were just livid. Some couldn't isten, they'd get very angry; loud voices would take over and people who were trying to get a better understanding of how to navigate through this would be sitting feeling unheard. We went through the process of talking about the offer. Over time we did more things like workshops and breakout groups. From an engagement perspective, we were all trained in IAP2. We looked at different tactics to break down the hostile kind of vibe in most meetings. There were areas with different kinds of challenges. 

 

We developed a pyramid of psycho-social supports, which ranged from community supports at the bottom of the pyramid which everyone could access, through to individual mental health interventions at the top. We wanted to support people to stay well, so they did not need the services at the top of the pyramid. The first port of call from a psycho-social recovery perspective was to try to connect with those community supports, your friends, family. That's where we used things like the All Right campaign, targeting messages to say it's all right not to be all right. There was a whole range of supports at that level. Another was Te Raranga, the interfaith network: we did neighbourhood days with them where people could get together. Council was doing similar things and in the middle of the pyramid there were some more targeted supports. The Earthquake Support Coordination Service helped people navigate the different processes, like the woman whose husband had died; he’d looked after all of the house stuff but their insurance policy hadn't been updated for years. At the top of the pyramid was more targeted mental health support. We would often hear concerns about increased suicide risk amongst community members. The philosophy behind the pyramid was if we could intervene early on before people tip over, they don't get to the top of the pyramid, and hopefully we could prevent those really life-changing, horrendous outcomes.

 

It was a real baptism of fire because we were all central government people with little experience of community engagement at a local level. The IAP2 training was critical: we were really lucky that we had amazing leadership from Michelle. She was a person who knew how to lead people through challenging times and had us all facing in the right direction. She formed strong relationships with people like Leanne Curtis, Peter Beck, the Student Volunteer Army. Our absolute philosophy was let's not build new things, but to build on what already exists. So if there were community organisations we could work with, how do we support them to lead the work they're already doing? The IAP framework teaches you to be really intentional about the nature of engagement with groups. The other thing is more how to engage and what sort of tactics work, because town hall meetings can turn very bad. They can be quite brutal for the agency representatives. I remember seeing people from EQC getting a poor reception; people were very angry, but they’re not necessarily attacking the person who wrote the agency's policy.

 

Can you describe the CERA red zone survey?

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The survey was fascinating. There was high uptake of the Crown offer to red zone residents, around 98 percent. I had a lot of conversations at the time with the CERA legal team as I didn't feel people had the natural justice of understanding the consequences of not taking the offer. These should have been more explicitly dealt with, both for Council so that ratepayers didn't end up with the expense of providing services, but also for the people when they got the offer that they could stay but know that they would need to manage their own services.

 

After people had taken the offer, we wanted to understand, with hindsight, how they felt about it. The survey outcomes were really favorable. When people had time to take the heat out of the situation and they’d moved on, they realised they're not living in a broken house with an endless insurance pathway. We did the survey right at the end because we wanted to give people as much space as possible. It was a bit of a mission finding where people had moved to. We had really high uptake and it was interesting to see the positive outcome of it all. But there were some things that people said, like the communication wasn't great. We were operating a classic social sector 80-20 situation. We had maybe 7,000 households moving, and we couldn't hand-hold everybody. I think lawyers’ fees were paid so people could consult about the offer. Then maybe 20 percent needed extra help. At one point we had real estate agents working in there.

 

The Earthquake Support Coordination Service was magic. The coordinators, about 45 FTEs, were drawn from existing social service agencies, so Methodist Mission, Catholic Social Services, etc. They had their networks already to refer people to support if they needed it. There was also the Residential Advisory Service, and groups like CanCERN. We did a lot of the advertising stuff you'd do anyway around service delivery. There were needs assessments done. We were also taking the information and making it consistent so people were asking the same questions. We coordinated door-to-door work as some places had had very little contact. I remember being quite shocked in about year four, finding an old guy whose toilet hadn't worked for years; he hadn’t wanted to make a fuss.

 

Then there was the CERA Legacy project?

I'll never forget the day CERA ended. We were just finishing the Lessons in Legacy work and sending it off to the printers. We were told to be out of the building at 2 o'clock, but my team was still there frantically getting everything up on the Earthquake Lessons in Legacy site on the day. The decision to do a legacy project would have been at least a year and a half before the end of CERA. We set up the framework and did all the interviews and then curated it into the lessons. We had the main report, then we had a whole lot of fact sheets and a little video of interviews.

 

 

After that you moved to Regenerate Christchurch: what was your role there?

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Initially I took a break with the police as director of a family violence pilot. Then Rob Kerr asked me to join Regenerate; it was a short-term contract again. It's a little hard to define my role really. It was around research and monitoring community input for the Ōtākaro Avon Corridor Regeneration Plan. I led the surveying of the community around what their needs were and what they wanted to see in the river corridor over time. I worked with Nielsen, because I liked working with them on surveys. The CERA wellbeing survey was a Nielsen product too. We wanted to understand what people thought was most important and needed in a red zone: we did neighbours, the rest of the city, the wider region, then we did across New Zealand. We had a range of needs and values, and asked people to rank them. The environmental needs came out higher: people were really concerned about water in particular.

 

But I was also doing a bunch of other stuff, like the bid for the landings funding from CERF [Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Fund]. I helped set up the exhibition [when ideas for the Plan were released to the public in 2018]. It was a bit of a jack of all trades situation. 

 

And this was followed by the New Brighton project?

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The main focus of Regenerate Christchurch was on the river corridor because it was the most significant piece of land and had the most political interest. The South Shore, South New Brighton project hadn't really progressed as much as it should have. There was also meant to be a Brooklands recovery plan. These had been left to the end. So it was decided that with Regenerate ending, the South Shore work would transfer to Council and that Brooklands would not progress, which was obviously not great news for that community. I came over to Council to talk about what we'd done. Katy McRae was leading the engagement work. She'd done an amazing job, setting up The How Team (www.renewbrighton.org). It was a really cool idea because there was low trust with the community, so The How Team was Council and community representatives working together, collaboratively, to develop an engagement plan that the community would see as acceptable. But the actual delivery of the project behind it had not progressed. The community was ready to go and there wasn't much there for them.

 

It came to Council with a real brutal timeline of three months to work out how to deal with earthquake legacy issues. Their concerns were mostly related to erosion and flood risk around the eastern edge of the estuary. Some people on the Community Board wanted the estuary edge rebuilt. Long story short, we got agreement for the edge to be encased largely in cobble, with an area of salt marsh to also be regenerated. That was very contentious because some people were not thrilled with natural solutions like saltmarsh. Jacobs did the work but we engaged a community-nominated technical representative as a neutral player. This was really good because the community expert supported the saltmarsh.  We agreed that the bund would be built up with a 20-year design life, so that we can circle back around and have an adaptation conversation that may in time lead to some different outcomes.

 

And this has led on to your coastal adaptation work?

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I’ve since established the adaptation planning programme in Council and have applied a number of themes and learnings from working with communities that experienced significant challenges in the post-earthquake environment. For example, our Coastal Adaptation Framework sets out our policy approach.  We knew adaptation planning had to be a co-creation process with the community so we use a Coastal Panel of community and rūnanga representatives to propose the adaptation pathways (supported by a Specialist and Technical Advisory Group).   

 

We have also been very clear about what is not on the table, for example legally, private owners are responsible for their own assets, so Council is clear that we are planning around public assets. This is a hard message but it’s about gaining a shared understanding at the start: the scope of the work, where you can influence and where you can’t.  Another critical aspect of our approach includes the principle of  intergenerational equity which has led to the establishment of the Climate Resilience Fund which will help fund adaptation of public infrastructure in 30+ years time so that our children and grandchildren aren't paying for everything.

 

Do you feel that other places have learned from the Christchurch experience over the last decade?

 

No, and I think it's really sad. I'm always going to be a bureaucrat, so I'm going to speak from that perspective. I feel sad that the huge efforts of the CERA staff are not recognized. It was a difficult time because naturally the recovery was a contested and challenging experience for everyone. But I feel the people who really did their best for the city, really dedicated people, have not always had their contributions acknowledged.  With hindsight, many things could have been better, but things could also have been a lot worse. There was a huge government investment and effort and focus that will likely never be able to be replicated in the future with another retreat.

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Interview with Eric Pawson at Christchurch City Council, 19 September 2024