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. There was a government thing that didn't really fire. 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 angry 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. Brooklands was interesting. Ollie Olsen had set up a Brooklands Stayers group. People were adamant they were going to stay. Then the night before the offer closed, he took the offer which left them pretty surprised. The offer had a hard date, although it didn't actually close then.

 

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 were dealing constantly with stories of suicidal people. 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 used to hiding in our agencies. 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 like Bruce Emson from EQC getting nailed; people were very angry, but they’re not necessarily the person who wrote the 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 without water or whatever.

 

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. I got the responsibility of leading that work but I recruited Sarah Beavan, and Leslie Patterson. They 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.

 

Michelle set it up and then Benesia Smith who was in the policy area at CERA said we'll do the rest of the organisation. There was a bit of friction between the two teams because we'd started earlier and got a lot done and there was a big squabble at the end about where the red zone lessons went because they were technically in our area. All this material is still there but it’s not easy to access as the EQ Recovery Learning site architecture is no longer available [for access details see the attached letter from Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet].

 

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. But it was a one-year fixed term and the police were not the easiest people to work with. 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. We had to spend a lot of time trying to pincer Rob because he would have these very big ideas and we'd have to kind of ground him. He developed the planning process as a braid: he'd done an amazing job of setting up a very complex project over time at the outset. It made sense when he developed it, but at key points it no longer made so much sense. We had to figure out how to meet the requirements of the outline, from a judicial review risk kind of perspective, but then make it valid for the community to have input into that part of the process. There was a lot of figuring out about how to do that.

 

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 but the project manager hadn't really delivered. 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. When I look at them now, neither of these things should have been a problem. But they looked across the estuary to Sumner where there was a gleaming coastal pathway being built and they just felt hard done by. Some people on the Community Board wanted the estuary edge rebuilt. Long story short, we got agreement for the edge to be where the properties had been removed, and having it encased largely in cobble. We added an area for salt marsh. That was very contentious because the community did not like the idea of salt marsh, natural solutions weren’t going to protect them, etc. etc. Jacobs did the work but we engaged a community-nominated technical representative as a neutral player. This was really good because these meetings were very tense and quite unpleasant for my staff. People were just so passionate about it. But we also agreed that the bund would be built up. We got both these things across the line 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 program in Council. That also has a lot of common themes and learnings that I've applied from work with communities that are experiencing these kinds of challenges and will probably need to do, in a lot of cases, a proactive retreat as opposed to the reactive retreat that was the red zone. South Shore was essentially a trust-building exercise. Tim Sintes said to me at the end of the project, you’ve rebuilt trust in the Council. That was good; having said that there’s still the consenting phase and I’m not the person to talk about that.

 

I couldn’t quite believe that then I’d managed to get the mandate to set up an adaptation programme at Council. I’m not exactly your classic adaptation lead – I’ve got a Masters in New Zealand history! But what I do have is that experience we’ve been talking about. We have decided to tag team with the Coastal Hazards Plan Change because alongside adaptation planning, which is a collaborative process, we really need to regulate and stop further development in high-risk areas. It had to be a co-creation process, so we put out adaptation planning for engagement with the community. This is very IAP2 influenced as well; it set out the scope of what we are doing. Private owners are responsible for their own assets, so we are planning around public assets. This is a hard message but again it’s a shared understanding at the start: the scope of the work, where you can influence and where you can’t.

 

It covers the whole district. Intergenerational equity is the real driver for me: we’ve done a lot of work with children’s groups. The intention was that there will be a different outcome for each community because of their different circumstances but we’ll run the same process. We want to be equitable. I was trying to manage not just community expectations but councillor expectations too. Council signed off the agreement that the coastal panel will be the people who put forward the preferred pathways. We’ve been running the process in Lyttelton Harbour, Whakaraupō, since October 2023. The panel has a requirement to have young people, and two rūnanga reps, a zone committee rep, a community board rep and six members of the public. We tried to distribute the public reps across geographic areas and demographic groups.

 

Intergenerational equity with climate change is obviously important. We had a bunch of policy principles and the idea of having a coastal panel that drives the work. The panel has been supported by a STAG, a specialist and technical advisory group. We have asset owners from council, ecologists, a multi-hazard person, our coastal scientists, we've got ECan [Environment Canterbury]. We've got cultural expertise, public health expertise for a wellbeing perspective. We developed priority adaptation locations (PALs) at Rapaki, Allendale, Teddington, Charteris Bay, Pūrau and Kōkara, Port Levy. The draft adaptation plan is coming out on 16 October. What's been amazing through this process is the convergence between the views of our STAG, our team, the coastal panel and rūnanga. So while we've got rūnanga reps on the panel, we also have hui at marae with both Ngāti Wheke and with Koukourarata because the coastal panel reps don't have mandates to make decisions all by themselves. We're supporting them to have those conversations.

 

It will be signed off next year and then we move to the next adaptation area. I put a bid into Council’s Long Term Plan for doubling of resources. The other thing I put up in the LTP and got across the line, which I'm really proud of, is the Climate Resilience Fund. I wanted it called the Climate Adaptation Fund. It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth. We're doing the policy work now and it kicks in from 1 July. If we get it all across the line with elected members that money will be set aside for a generation and then unlocked, and it will help with that transition in 20 to 30 years' time so that our children and grandchildren aren't paying for everything. It’s limited to public infrastructure.

 

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 there's opposition, and there was opposition between Council and CERA, between the community and agencies, but I feel the people who really did their best for the city, really dedicated people, were almost labelled the enemy in some ways. And there's not that capturing of their voice. At the university there was the 10-year anniversary Lessons in Legacy symposium, before the pandemic. I went along and listened to a whole lot of academics and people in the community talking about how rubbish everything was. Nobody from CERA spoke. But there's a range of different views and the ones that often get the airtime are the ones around how things could have been better. And yes, they could have, but my message is actually things could have been a lot worse. There was a huge government investment and effort and and focus that will never be able to be replicated in the future with retreat.

 

The story is not more widely known elsewhere because bureaucrats don't get to tell their story. I'm not super taxed about it, it's just life. But the work I’m now leading on climate adaptation, the transfer of knowledge has been critical. And a lot of people do look to us for insights. There's a network that's sprung up called the Climate Adaptation Network that's local government practitioners around the country and we share experiences and information and they really have looked to us a lot. We had a hui here last year. We focused it around psycho-social impact because, as I started by saying, I'm a funny person in this world. A lot of the work's led by planners or by scientists or engineers. And they don't tend to naturally think about people's well-being as the front part of the work. And so we focused the hui around psycho-social well-being and a lot of people got a lot out of it. So I think that expertise is something that people do look to Christchurch for.

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