Regulating post-disaster reconstruction planning in China: towards a resilience-based approach?

An Evaluation of the Paired Assistance to Disaster-Affected Areas Program in Disaster Recovery: The Case of the Wenchuan Earthquake

“…It was embedded in a layered and nested top-down regime to ensure that recovery tasks could be completed in such a manner that the assisting provinces with more resources could help the assisted counties where fewer resources could be mobilized to achieve a balanced distribution of responsibility [34]. It is commented that local involvements are typically less innovative in assisting post-disaster recovery [31,34]. Thus, it is necessary to decentralize the decision-making power to the local level in order to respond to local needs efficiently and to enhance the local post-disaster rescue apacity.…”

“…Together with other types of aid programs, the PADAA program was implemented in the counties which were badly affected by the Wenchuan earthquake. The literature related to the Wenchuan earthquake has typically focused on the short-term emergency management period [2,3]; the post-disaster recovery plans and reconstruction [31,34]; and the disaster recovery outcomes in the long term [33] such as the livelihood recovery [33], the vegetation recovery [35], and the business recovery [36]. Research on the post-disaster recovery in the long term, especially in regard to the impact of the PADAA program on the overall post-disaster recovery over both the short and long term, is not well established.…”

“…The mean values from 2006 and 2007 were used as the reference years. The K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm [34] was used to calculate the distances between County_A and County_B against the two reference units. The average distance between County_A and County_B was used as the selection method.…”

Implementing post-earthquake reconstruction plans in China: a resilience perspective

“…Resilient reconstruction planning oftentimes starts with carefully composed reconstruction plans that convey resilient thinking. Since reconstruction planning practices in China were part of the conventional construction planning that strictly followed the traditional standards and procedures, resilience discourses were not explicitly adopted in reconstruction plans (Shao and Xu 2017). However, this general observation did not preclude the existence of resilience evidence in these plans.…”

“…The sudden outbreak of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in China brought detrimental casualty and economic loss on the disaster-affected areas, resulting in 69,227 deaths and causing a total direct economic loss of 845.1 billion Chinese yuan (Xing and Xu 2011). Immediately after the earthquake, reconstruction was proposed and planned, enabled through a sophisticated top-down policy framework (Shao and Xu 2017). Reconstruction planning and its pertinent issues have also drawn the attention of interested scholars (Ge et al 2010;Dunford and Li 2011;Yin et al 2012;Guo 2012;Liu et al 2014).…”