Disaster-Recovery Social Capital and Community Participation in Earthquake-Stricken Ya’an Areas

Abstract

Social capital plays a significant role in post-disaster community participation and disaster recovery. This study divides social capital into three aspects: Cognition, structure, and relation, and discusses the impact of these factors on community participation in post-disaster recovery. Through data analysis, we found that a self-organized relationship villager network had a positive effect on villagers’ participation in voluntary community activities after an earthquake, while the local cadre relationship network had a negative impact. However, the latter could encourage villagers to participate in disaster-recovery activities organized by the local government. These findings indicate that the mobilization mechanism for post-disaster local-government reconstruction and community self-organization are the same, both coming through the social-acquaintance network, a type of noninstitutionalized social capital. The implication of this study suggests that local government should attach much importance to the construction and integration of social networks in earthquake-stricken areas to cultivate community social capital.

Social capital and community disaster resilience: post-earthquake tourism recovery on Gili Trawangan, Indonesia

“…This study supports existing literature suggesting an iterative and positive link between social capital and community disaster resilience, manifested through collective action. Similar findings have been documented in diverse cases e.g., (Woolcock 1998 ; Larsen et al 2004 ; Bolte and Eucker 2012 ; Aldrich and Meyer 2015 ; Sadri et al 2017 ; Chan et al 2018 ; Wei and Han 2018 ; Li and Tan 2019 ). Future work would benefit from exploring, not if there is a relationship, but the role of context in shaping the degree of and nuances of the relationship.…”

“…Engaging in shared experiences, actions and activities seems to be a general feature that fosters social capital formation, mostly bonding and bridging ties. Either shared physical activities or cognitive shared experiences seem to be key, in ways that make sense in the community context e.g., (Taylor 2011 ; Gallagher et al 2019 ; Li and Tan 2019 ; Shimpo et al 2019 ). However, developing policies that do this in other places in ways that make sense locally, remains a substantial gap between what the literature says is beneficial and what can be done about it proactively and perhaps preventively for disaster resilience.…”

“…[and that] networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust….coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved (p. 66)”. At the community level, social capital has been studied extensively in environmental governance (Rudd 2000 ; Ostrom and Ahn 2001 ; Pretty and Ward 2001 ), social movements (Benford and Snow 2000 ; Lubell 2002 ), development (Woolcock and Narayan 2000 ), and disaster studies (Marín et al 2015 ; Sadri et al 2017 ; Wei and Han 2018 ; Gallagher et al 2019 ; Li and Tan 2019 ). Pretty and Ward ( 2001 ) argue that social capital “….is central to equitable and sustainable solutions to local development problems…[and]…is likely to be related to the availability of social capital locally, but also to appropriate inputs from government and voluntary agencies”.…”

Three Lines of Defense for Wildfire Risk Management in Electric Power Grids: A Review

“…Therefore, utilities and local governments should facilitate community engagement on an ongoing basis to obtain their buy-ins and ensure a smooth recovery process from potential wildfires in the future. In this context, various studies on the importance of social capital and community engagement in the recovery process for floods [168], earthquakes [169], hurricanes [170], and wildfires [171][172][173] are presented in the literature. A systematic literature review on community engagement for disaster preparedness can be found in [174].…”

Disaster risk reduction activities as learning

“…Learning is strongly associated with discovery and hence requires self-regulation. Learning also takes the forms of the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction (Weibell 2011;Schunk 2012;Lefrançois 2019). One of the most influential constructivist theorists is Dewey (1933).…”