Natural disasters will always be a feature of the Australian way of life and governments have developed public policy responses for dealing with loss and damage resulting from disasters.  Most recently, government policy has shifted toward an emphasis on disaster resilience and all Australian governments adopted the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (NSDR) in early 2011. The NSDR offered a new paradigm that called on all sectors of the community to adopt resilience-based behaviours in the face of the inevitability of natural disasters. We were encouraged to become more self reliant and disaster policy would focus more on disaster preparation, prevention and mitigation rather than on relief and recovery.  Knowledge and awareness of risks and sharing responsibility to reduce risks has become the new mantra of government policy under the NSDR. While there appears to be a general consensus on the types of high-level policies that are needed to build disaster resilience, there are gaps in our knowledge about how to operationalise disaster-resilience policy to achieve these ideals.

This paper proposes a concept for a disaster-resilience policy-implementation framework that can be applied in a multi-level governance system. Four adaptive capacities identified by Norris et al (2008) provide the theoretical basis for the framework. Theoretical and empirical evidence drawn from policy implementation studies and evaluations of national strategic policies in Australia also provide data relevant to policy implementation in a multi-level governance system, i.e. the Australian Federation. Application of the framework to the analysis of case studies of a number of major activities being implemented under the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience at national, sub-national and local government levels and in the business sector will test its potential utility and provide information about the effectiveness of the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience.