DISASTERS AND RESILIENCE
PUBLICATIONS ON DISASTERS AND RESILIENCE
How Social Ties Influence Hurricane Evacuation Behavior (in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interactions)
Disasters carry enormous costs every year, both in terms of lives and materials. Evacuation from potentially affected areas stands
out among the most critical factors that can reduce mortality and vulnerability to crisis. We know surprisingly little about the factors
that drive this important and often life-saving behavior, though recent work has suggested that social capital may play a critical and
previously underestimated role in disaster preparedness. Moving beyond retrospective self-reporting and vehicle count estimates, we use
social media data to examine connections between levels of social capital and evacuation behavior. This work is the first of its kind,
examining these phenomena across three major disasters in the United States—Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria—using
aggregated, de-identified data from over 1.5 million Facebook users. Our analysis confirms that, holding confounding factors constant,
several aspects of social capital are correlated with whether or not an individual evacuates. Higher levels of bridging and linking social
ties correlate strongly with evacuation. However, these social capital related factors are not significantly associated with the rate of
return after evacuation.
Urban resilience implementation: A policy challenge and research agenda for the 21st century (in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management)
Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As governments and institutions confront threats such as environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognise that resilience can serve as a key policy response. Many organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups promote resilience. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it.
Engineering meets institutions: an interdisciplinary approach to management of resilience engineering (with Nader Naderpajouh et al, in Environment Systems and Decisions)
In this study, we carry out a review of three different perspectives on resilience - engineering, social, and organizational - in order to explore resilience management in the context of governance of infrastructure systems. We discuss the common practices to address resilience of engineering systems, the need and current trend for integration of institutions into these practices through formal as well as informal mechanisms. To illustrate our theorizing, we provide three illustrative case studies.
Social Ties are the Engine of Resilience (in Crisis Response Journal)
Many deaths that occur during events such as flooding, fires, hurricanes and mudslides, could be prevented by leaving vulnerable areas,
but people don’t always move, even after receiving evacuation orders or warnings of imminent risk. To understand why, we worked with Facebook to understand evacuation patterns based on the structure of people’s social networks before, during and after hurricanes. We found that social networks, especially connections to those beyond immediate family, influence decisions to leave or stay in place before disasters.
The Right Way to Build Resilience to Climate Change (in Current History)
For years, it was possible to assume that climate change would create problems only for future generations. No longer. Societies around the world face the effects of climate change on a daily basis. Millions of people from developing countries flee every year from slowly unfolding climate related crises like drought and famine. These crises in turn may be fueling political violence and civil wars over access to water, fertile land, and other resources. This article investigates how social infrastructure - the ties that bind people to each other - can form a framework for understanding the ways that societies can transform themselves to build resilience to climate change.
Social capital as a shield against anxiety among displaced residents from Fukushima (with Yasuyuki Sawada and Keiko Iwasaki, forthcoming in Natural Hazards)
The March 2011 meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan resulted in an increased risk of psychological distress among affected residents. We conducted original surveys of Futaba residents, a town in Fukushima where all of the residents were forced to evacuate from their homes due to radioactive contamination, obtaining 585 responses (a response rate of about 20%). Using this original data set, we investigate the role of social capital in maintaining mental health among the residents. First, we found the level of stress captured by the Kessler index (K6) to be unusually high compared both with people across Japan and with those who were displaced because of the earthquake and/or tsunami (but not the nuclear catastrophe). However, having high levels of social capital—captured by the number of neighbors from Futaba after displacement, participation in volunteer work after displacement, and participation in tea parties after displacement—plays an important role in reducing anxiety and distress among Futaba residents. Finally, we provide concrete recommendations for policy makers and NGOs to increase resilience among affected residents by strengthening social ties.
Chapter: The Importance of Social Capital in Building Community Resilience in Yan and Galloway 2017
This chapter uses examples from a number of recent disasters to illuminate the ways that social capital serves as a critical part of resilience. Specifically the article looks at the response from the perspective of social networks to disaster in Bangkok, Thailand, the Tohoku region of Japan, and Christchurch in New Zealand. I introduce three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking— and discuss the mechanism by which they are created and employed using concrete examples. In these cases social cohesion keeps people from leaving disaster-struck
regions, allows for the easy mobilization of groups, and provides informal insurance when normal resource providers are not open. Social networks improve disaster recovery for local residents, communities, and the nation as well. Disasters are, and will continue to be, a challenge for both developed and developing countries everywhere. With this understanding in mind, it is important that communities build social capital in advance of disasters by communities as well as by planners and other decision makers. Preparing for disaster with an emphasis on
physical infrastructural solutions, such as higher seawalls, raised floors, higher building standards, and so forth, is not sufficient to avoid the negative impact of disasters.
Review of Beyond Fukushima: Toward a Post Nuclear Society by Koichi Hasegawa (forthcoming in Journal of Japanese Studies)
This important new book tackles a question that has vexed many observers since the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plants in Japan. While in the early 2000s many observers proclaimed the start of a global nuclear renaissance, the inability of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to prevent and then successful contain a nuclear accident at Fukushima put that on hold.
Review of The Cure for Catastrophe and Love Canal (forthcoming in American Scientist)
Casual observers of catastrophe continue to distinguish between human-caused and natural disasters, but in either case consider them to be unforeseeable, out-of-nowhere events. Two recent books—Love Canal, by Richard Newman, and The Cure for Catastrophe, by Robert Muir-Wood—might change some minds. Although oil spills and train derailments that release hazardous substances are clearly the unintended results of societal choices, other well-publicized catastrophes generally understood to be “natural” disasters should be seen in the same light.
Review of Beyond Fukushima by Koichi Hasegawa (forthcoming in Journal of Japanese Studies)
This important new book tackles a question that has vexed many observers since the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plants in Japan. While in the early 2000s many observers had proclaimed the start of a global nuclear renaissance, the inability of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to prevent and then successfully contain a nuclear accident at Fukushima put that on hold. A number of governments around the world, including those in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland used Japan’s nuclear accident, rated at the maximum of the International Nuclear Event Scale level, as a policy window to change their energy policies. Uranium prices have dropped precipitously as the market envisions less global demand for nuclear fuel; the countries building the most new nuclear plants are primarily authoritarian ones (e.g. China and Russia).
Trust deficit: Japanese communities and the challenge of rebuilding Tohoku forthcoming in Japan Forum
Trust between civil society and the state is a necessary pre-condition for successful public policy in advanced industrial democracies. It is all the more important following a mass catastrophe that affects hundreds of thousands and upends the rhythms of daily life across the country. Choices made by the Japanese government and energy utilities during and after the compounded 11 March 2011 disasters damaged relationships between civil society, utility firms, and the government. This article looks at how decision makers in Japan continue to struggle with a trust deficit and how that gap has altered the behavior of NGOs and civil society as a while. Residents will continue to resist what they see as flawed disaster recovery and nuclear restart processes unless the political system undergoes major reform.
Social Capital and Climate Change Adaptation (with Courtney Page and Chris Paul) forthcoming in ORE Climate Science
A great deal of research has shown how social capital (the bonding, bridging, and linking connections to others) provides information on trustworthiness, facilitates collective action, and connects us to external resources during disasters and crises. We know far less about the relationship between social capital and adaptation behaviors in terms of the choices that people make to accommodate changing environmental conditions. A number of unanswered but critical questions remain: How precisely does social capital function in climate change adaptation? To what degree does strong bonding social capital substitute for successful adaptation behaviors for individuals or groups? Which combination of social factors make coping, adapting, and transforming most likely? How can social capital help migrating populations maintain cultural identity under stress? How can local networks be integrated into higher level policy interventions to improve adaptation? Which political and social networks contribute to transformative responses to climate change at local, regional, and international levels? This article serves as a comprehensive literature review, overview of empirical findings to date, and a research agenda for the future.
Review of John Singleton's Economic and Natural Disasters since 1900 for The Developing Economies
This book creates a new, expanded disaster cycle in its analysis of a broad range of crises ranging from the Great Depression to WWI to various mining disasters.
Review of Ami Abou-Bakr's Managing Disasters and Patrick Roberts' Disasters and the American State
These two new books tackle the topic of disaster management and response from very different angles but share a focus on the role of public- and private-sector institutions in managing crises. Both works suggest that the United States should attempt a more optimal balance among private, public, and local actors than can be found in current disaster management systems.
Social Capital and Resilience: Informal Policy Brief for the World Humanitarian Summit (with Robert Smith)
Despite regular claims about the importance of communities and crisis-affected individuals, the humanitarian aid system remains in many respects a top-down, centralized system which too often overlooks the power of social networks and social capital among crisis-affected people. We show how social capital serves as a critical resource for those in crisis and illuminate the lack of research and programmatic focus on this resource in conflict situations in less developed countries (LDCs)--where the large majority of the world’s humanitarian needs and aid occur. We believe that the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) can serve as a focal point for scholars, institutions and practitioners for collaborating on research and better integrating social capital into policy and programs as a source of resilience. There is good reason to suppose that modifying aid approaches to build on social capital’s potential effects would produce important gains in the effort to address the major humanitarian crises of today and tomorrow--and finding such gains is the core objective of the WHS.
The Need for Social Capital (in the Oriental Economist)
Mortality rates from the 11 March 2011 tsunami varied tremendously across coastal cities; in some areas, no one was killed, while in other areas, as much as 1/10 of the population died. This article summarizes our publication from Social Science and Medicine to focus on the role that trust, networks, and social capital played in saving lives during disaster.
Elders Leading the Way to Resilience (with Emily Kiyota et al.)
The theory of change behind this project draws on multiple constructs, including elder empowerment, ibasho, community bonding, social capital, and community resilience. We argue that: 1. Empowering elders changes the way they feel about their role in their community 2. Creating the Ibasho Café (both physical and social infrastructures) with elders in a leadership role increases the community bonding among the members of all ages 3. A strong sense of community bonding increases the level of social network and community participation, enhancing the sense of belonging and trust, and developing reciprocity between neighbors 4. An enhanced sense of social capital strengthens the community’s resilience so it is better prepared to withstand future natural disasters and the impacts of global aging.
NCDMPH report from workshop: Learning to Build Resilience at the Neighborhood Level
Main points: 1. Building social capital in local communities may better prepare them for disaster recovery. 2. Neighborhoods can build social capital by forming neighborhood empowerment groups, for example, the Neighborhood Empowerment Network in San Francisco—these leverage leadership inherent in the neighborhood and increase social capital through relationship building. 3. Building social capital can be made accessible and fun by including diverse groups of people and encouraging participation in a variety of projects, including a tabletop exercise demonstrated during the session.
The physical and social determinants of mortality in the 3.11 tsunami published in Social Science and Medicine
The human consequences of the 3.11 tsunami were not distributed equally across the municipalities of the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. Instead, the mortality rate from the massive waves varied tremendously from zero to ten percent of the local residential population. What accounts for this variation remains a critical question for researchers and policy makers alike. This paper uses a new, sui generis data set including all villages, towns, and cities on the Pacific Ocean side of the Tohoku region to untangle the factors connected to mortality during the disaster. With data on demographic, geophysical, infrastructure, social capital, and political conditions for 133 municipalities, we find that tsunami height, stocks of social capital, and level of political support for the long-ruling LDP strongly influenced mortality rates. Given the high probability of future large scale catastrophes, these findings have important policy implications for disaster mitigation policies in Japan and abroad
Social Capital and Community Resilience published in American Behavioral Scientist
Despite the ubiquity of disaster and the increasing toll in human lives and financial costs, much research and policy remain focused on physical infrastructure–centered approaches to such events. Governmental organizations such as the DHS, FEMA, USAID, and United Kingdom’s DFID continue to spend heavily on hardening levees, raising existing homes, and repairing damaged facilities despite evidence that social, not
physical, infrastructure drives resilience. This article highlights the critical role of social capital and networks in disaster survival and recovery and lays out recent literature and evidence on the topic. We look at definitions of social capital, measurement and proxies, types of social capital, and mechanisms and application. The article concludes with concrete policy recommendations for disaster managers, government decision
makers, and nongovernmental organizations for increasing resilience to catastrophe through strengthening social infrastructure at the community level.
Review of Richard Samuels' book 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan (Cornell University Press 2013)
The book uses interviews with 70 or so Japanese and US government officials and hundreds of Japanese and English books, newspaper articles,
and government publications to map out three main discourses about the catastrophe. Samuels classifies these as “put it in gear,” “stay the course,” and “back to the future.” The “put it in gear” camp hoped to use the disaster as motivation to try out innovative policy approaches, while the “stay the course” camp envisioned the event as a one-in-a-million, black swan-type anomaly which did not require a change in direction...
The Politics of Natural Disasters for Oxford Bibliographies
Political scientists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, economists, and historians have studied disaster recovery, best practices in disaster response, the role of the government in rebuilding, and so forth. This annotated bibliography illuminates representative examples of the interdisciplinary work in this vast academic subfield. Most of the work that I have selected for inclusion comes from the end of the 20th century and early 21st century, but builds on the work of scholars such as Samuel Prince, who wrote about the 1917 Halifax harbor explosion three years later, and on mid-1950s and 1960s work sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Sections include general overviews, centers and data sources, comparative approach, case studies of individual disasters, recovery, natural, man-made, and natural/technological disasters, mitigation, preparation, and insurance, vulnerabilities, evacuation, emergent groups, disaster myths and behavior, humanitarian response, governance during and after, social capital in disaster recovery, political outcomes, political and economic impact, temporary housing, and resilience.
Post-Crisis Japanese Nuclear Policy: From Top-down Directives to Bottom-up Activism published in East West Center Asia Pacific Issues No. 103 January 2012
Over the past fifty years, Japan has developed one of the most advanced commercial nuclear power programs in the world. This is largely due to the government’s broad repertoire of policy instruments that have helped further its nuclear power goals. These top-down directives have resulted in the construction of 54 plants and at least the appearance of widespread support for nuclear power. By the 1990s, however, this carefully cultivated public support was beginning to break apart. And following the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 and resulting nuclear crisis in the Fukushima nuclear complex, the political and social landscape for energy in Japan has been dramatically altered. The crisis has raised and reinforced environmental concerns and health fears, as well as skepticism about information from government and corporate sources. A civil society that for decades has appeared weak and nonpartcipatory has awakened and citizens are carrying out bottom-up responses to the accident, effecting change with grassroots science and activism.
Future Fission: Why Japan Won’t Abandon Nuclear Power published in GlobalAsia
The nuclear plant disaster triggered by March’s earthquake and tsunami triggered soul-searching over its scale and the slow reaction. Some lay the blame on amakudari, a phrase describing the cozy relationship between Japanese government regulators and the industries they regulate. I explore these allegations and outline a range of reasons why Japan’s government will not waver from its commitment to champion nuclear energy.
The Tohoku Disaster: Crisis Windows, Complexity, and Social Capital published by the Social Science Research Council
At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake, known as the Higashi Nihon Daishinsai (Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster), struck roughly fifty miles off the coast of Japan’s mainland. While the Tohoku quake itself caused few fatalities, it set off a tsunami measuring up to forty-five-feet high, which not only devastated coastal and inland villages but also swamped the backup systems of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-reactor complex. This article investigates the disaster using several social science frames, including policy windows, complexity, and social capital.
Externalities of Strong Social Capital: Post Tsunami Recovery in Southeast Asia published in Journal of Civil Society
Much research has implied that social capital functions as an unqualified “public good,” enhancing governance, economic performance, and quality of life (Coleman 1988; Cohen and Arato 1992; Putnam 1993; Cohen and Rogers 1995). Scholars of disaster (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Adger et al. 2005; Dynes 2005; Tatsuki 2008) have extended this concept to posit that social capital provides nonexcludable benefits to whole communities after major crises. Using qualitative methods to analyze data from villages in Tamil Nadu, India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, this paper demonstrates that high levels of social capital simultaneously provided strong benefits and equally strong negative externalities, especially to those already on the periphery of society. In these villages, high levels of social capital reduced barriers to collective action for members of the uur panchayats (hamlet councils) and parish councils, speeding up their recovery and connecting them to aid organizations, but at the same time reinforced obstacles to recovery for women, Dalits, migrants, and Muslims. These localized findings have important implications for academic studies of social capital and policy formation for future disasters and recovery schemes.
Between Market and State: Directions in Social Science Research on Disaster in Perspectives on Politics
In this extended review, I discuss three recent books on disaster: Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability, and Learning edited by Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul ‘T Hart, Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response , edited by Howard Kunreuther and Micheel Useem, and The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters by Charles Perrow. All three books invoke the market and state as core forces at work in mitigation and disaster recovery, overlooking the critical role of social capital.
Separate and Unequal: Post-Tsunami Aid Distribution in Southern India published in Social Science Quarterly
Objective. Disasters are a regular occurrence throughout the world. Whether all eligible victims of a catastrophe receive similar amounts of aid from governments and donors following a crisis remains an open question. Methods. I use data on 62 similarly damaged inland fishing villages in five districts of southeastern India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to measure the causal influence of caste, location, wealth, and bridging social capital on the receipt of aid. Using two-limit tobit and negative binomial models, I investigate the factors that influence the time spent in refugee camps, receipt of an initial aid packet, and receipt of 4,000 rupees. Results. Caste, family status, and wealth proved to be powerful predictors of beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries during the aid process. Conclusion. While many scholars and practitioners envision aid distribution as primarily a technocratic process, this research shows that discrimination and financial resources strongly affect the flow of disaster aid.
The Power of People: Social Capital’s Role in Recovery from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake published in Natural Hazards
Despite the regularity of disasters, social science has only begun to generate replicable knowledge about the factors which facilitate post-crisis recovery. Building on the broad variation in recovery rates within disaster-affected cities, I investigate the ability of Kobe’s nine wards to repopulate after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. This article uses case studies of neighborhoods in Kobe alongside new time-series, cross-sectional data set to test five variables thought to influence recovery along with the relatively untested factor of social capital. Controlling for damage, population density, economic conditions, inequality and other variables thought important in past research, social capital proves to be the strongest and most robust predictor of population recovery after catastrophe. This has important implications both for public policies focused on reconstruction and for social science more generally.
Fixing Recovery: Social Capital in Post-Crisis Resilience in The Journal of Homeland Security June 2010
Disasters remain among the most critical events which impact residents and their neighborhoods; they have killed far more individuals than high salience issues such as terrorism. Unfortunately, disaster recovery programs run by the United States and foreign governments have not been updated to reflect a new understanding of the essential nature of social capital and networks. I call for a re-orientation of disaster preparedness and recovery programs at all levels away from the standard fixes focused on physical infrastructure towards ones targeting social infrastructure. The reservoirs of social capital and the trust (or lack thereof) between citizens in disaster-affected communities can help us understand why some neighborhoods in cities like Kobe, Japan, Tamil Nadu, India, and New Orleans, Louisiana displayed resilience while others stagnated. Social capital – the engine for recovery – can be deepened both through local initiatives and interventions from foreign agencies.
The Crucial Role of Civil Society in Disaster Recovery and Japan’s Preparedness for Emergencies in Japan aktuell 3/28
This article is concerned with the empirical puzzle of why certain neighborhoods and localities recover more quickly than others following disasters. It illuminates four mainstream theories of rehabilitation and resilience, and then investigates a neglected factor, namely the role of social networks and civil society. Initial analyses underscore the important role of trust and connectivity among local residents in the process of rebuilding. After examining the role of civil society in Japan’spreparedness for emergencies, the article concludes with some policy recommendations for governments and nongovernmental actors involved in disaster relief.
Disasters carry enormous costs every year, both in terms of lives and materials. Evacuation from potentially affected areas stands
out among the most critical factors that can reduce mortality and vulnerability to crisis. We know surprisingly little about the factors
that drive this important and often life-saving behavior, though recent work has suggested that social capital may play a critical and
previously underestimated role in disaster preparedness. Moving beyond retrospective self-reporting and vehicle count estimates, we use
social media data to examine connections between levels of social capital and evacuation behavior. This work is the first of its kind,
examining these phenomena across three major disasters in the United States—Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria—using
aggregated, de-identified data from over 1.5 million Facebook users. Our analysis confirms that, holding confounding factors constant,
several aspects of social capital are correlated with whether or not an individual evacuates. Higher levels of bridging and linking social
ties correlate strongly with evacuation. However, these social capital related factors are not significantly associated with the rate of
return after evacuation.
Urban resilience implementation: A policy challenge and research agenda for the 21st century (in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management)
Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As governments and institutions confront threats such as environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognise that resilience can serve as a key policy response. Many organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups promote resilience. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it.
Engineering meets institutions: an interdisciplinary approach to management of resilience engineering (with Nader Naderpajouh et al, in Environment Systems and Decisions)
In this study, we carry out a review of three different perspectives on resilience - engineering, social, and organizational - in order to explore resilience management in the context of governance of infrastructure systems. We discuss the common practices to address resilience of engineering systems, the need and current trend for integration of institutions into these practices through formal as well as informal mechanisms. To illustrate our theorizing, we provide three illustrative case studies.
Social Ties are the Engine of Resilience (in Crisis Response Journal)
Many deaths that occur during events such as flooding, fires, hurricanes and mudslides, could be prevented by leaving vulnerable areas,
but people don’t always move, even after receiving evacuation orders or warnings of imminent risk. To understand why, we worked with Facebook to understand evacuation patterns based on the structure of people’s social networks before, during and after hurricanes. We found that social networks, especially connections to those beyond immediate family, influence decisions to leave or stay in place before disasters.
The Right Way to Build Resilience to Climate Change (in Current History)
For years, it was possible to assume that climate change would create problems only for future generations. No longer. Societies around the world face the effects of climate change on a daily basis. Millions of people from developing countries flee every year from slowly unfolding climate related crises like drought and famine. These crises in turn may be fueling political violence and civil wars over access to water, fertile land, and other resources. This article investigates how social infrastructure - the ties that bind people to each other - can form a framework for understanding the ways that societies can transform themselves to build resilience to climate change.
Social capital as a shield against anxiety among displaced residents from Fukushima (with Yasuyuki Sawada and Keiko Iwasaki, forthcoming in Natural Hazards)
The March 2011 meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan resulted in an increased risk of psychological distress among affected residents. We conducted original surveys of Futaba residents, a town in Fukushima where all of the residents were forced to evacuate from their homes due to radioactive contamination, obtaining 585 responses (a response rate of about 20%). Using this original data set, we investigate the role of social capital in maintaining mental health among the residents. First, we found the level of stress captured by the Kessler index (K6) to be unusually high compared both with people across Japan and with those who were displaced because of the earthquake and/or tsunami (but not the nuclear catastrophe). However, having high levels of social capital—captured by the number of neighbors from Futaba after displacement, participation in volunteer work after displacement, and participation in tea parties after displacement—plays an important role in reducing anxiety and distress among Futaba residents. Finally, we provide concrete recommendations for policy makers and NGOs to increase resilience among affected residents by strengthening social ties.
Chapter: The Importance of Social Capital in Building Community Resilience in Yan and Galloway 2017
This chapter uses examples from a number of recent disasters to illuminate the ways that social capital serves as a critical part of resilience. Specifically the article looks at the response from the perspective of social networks to disaster in Bangkok, Thailand, the Tohoku region of Japan, and Christchurch in New Zealand. I introduce three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking— and discuss the mechanism by which they are created and employed using concrete examples. In these cases social cohesion keeps people from leaving disaster-struck
regions, allows for the easy mobilization of groups, and provides informal insurance when normal resource providers are not open. Social networks improve disaster recovery for local residents, communities, and the nation as well. Disasters are, and will continue to be, a challenge for both developed and developing countries everywhere. With this understanding in mind, it is important that communities build social capital in advance of disasters by communities as well as by planners and other decision makers. Preparing for disaster with an emphasis on
physical infrastructural solutions, such as higher seawalls, raised floors, higher building standards, and so forth, is not sufficient to avoid the negative impact of disasters.
Review of Beyond Fukushima: Toward a Post Nuclear Society by Koichi Hasegawa (forthcoming in Journal of Japanese Studies)
This important new book tackles a question that has vexed many observers since the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plants in Japan. While in the early 2000s many observers proclaimed the start of a global nuclear renaissance, the inability of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to prevent and then successful contain a nuclear accident at Fukushima put that on hold.
Review of The Cure for Catastrophe and Love Canal (forthcoming in American Scientist)
Casual observers of catastrophe continue to distinguish between human-caused and natural disasters, but in either case consider them to be unforeseeable, out-of-nowhere events. Two recent books—Love Canal, by Richard Newman, and The Cure for Catastrophe, by Robert Muir-Wood—might change some minds. Although oil spills and train derailments that release hazardous substances are clearly the unintended results of societal choices, other well-publicized catastrophes generally understood to be “natural” disasters should be seen in the same light.
Review of Beyond Fukushima by Koichi Hasegawa (forthcoming in Journal of Japanese Studies)
This important new book tackles a question that has vexed many observers since the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plants in Japan. While in the early 2000s many observers had proclaimed the start of a global nuclear renaissance, the inability of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to prevent and then successfully contain a nuclear accident at Fukushima put that on hold. A number of governments around the world, including those in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland used Japan’s nuclear accident, rated at the maximum of the International Nuclear Event Scale level, as a policy window to change their energy policies. Uranium prices have dropped precipitously as the market envisions less global demand for nuclear fuel; the countries building the most new nuclear plants are primarily authoritarian ones (e.g. China and Russia).
Trust deficit: Japanese communities and the challenge of rebuilding Tohoku forthcoming in Japan Forum
Trust between civil society and the state is a necessary pre-condition for successful public policy in advanced industrial democracies. It is all the more important following a mass catastrophe that affects hundreds of thousands and upends the rhythms of daily life across the country. Choices made by the Japanese government and energy utilities during and after the compounded 11 March 2011 disasters damaged relationships between civil society, utility firms, and the government. This article looks at how decision makers in Japan continue to struggle with a trust deficit and how that gap has altered the behavior of NGOs and civil society as a while. Residents will continue to resist what they see as flawed disaster recovery and nuclear restart processes unless the political system undergoes major reform.
Social Capital and Climate Change Adaptation (with Courtney Page and Chris Paul) forthcoming in ORE Climate Science
A great deal of research has shown how social capital (the bonding, bridging, and linking connections to others) provides information on trustworthiness, facilitates collective action, and connects us to external resources during disasters and crises. We know far less about the relationship between social capital and adaptation behaviors in terms of the choices that people make to accommodate changing environmental conditions. A number of unanswered but critical questions remain: How precisely does social capital function in climate change adaptation? To what degree does strong bonding social capital substitute for successful adaptation behaviors for individuals or groups? Which combination of social factors make coping, adapting, and transforming most likely? How can social capital help migrating populations maintain cultural identity under stress? How can local networks be integrated into higher level policy interventions to improve adaptation? Which political and social networks contribute to transformative responses to climate change at local, regional, and international levels? This article serves as a comprehensive literature review, overview of empirical findings to date, and a research agenda for the future.
Review of John Singleton's Economic and Natural Disasters since 1900 for The Developing Economies
This book creates a new, expanded disaster cycle in its analysis of a broad range of crises ranging from the Great Depression to WWI to various mining disasters.
Review of Ami Abou-Bakr's Managing Disasters and Patrick Roberts' Disasters and the American State
These two new books tackle the topic of disaster management and response from very different angles but share a focus on the role of public- and private-sector institutions in managing crises. Both works suggest that the United States should attempt a more optimal balance among private, public, and local actors than can be found in current disaster management systems.
Social Capital and Resilience: Informal Policy Brief for the World Humanitarian Summit (with Robert Smith)
Despite regular claims about the importance of communities and crisis-affected individuals, the humanitarian aid system remains in many respects a top-down, centralized system which too often overlooks the power of social networks and social capital among crisis-affected people. We show how social capital serves as a critical resource for those in crisis and illuminate the lack of research and programmatic focus on this resource in conflict situations in less developed countries (LDCs)--where the large majority of the world’s humanitarian needs and aid occur. We believe that the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) can serve as a focal point for scholars, institutions and practitioners for collaborating on research and better integrating social capital into policy and programs as a source of resilience. There is good reason to suppose that modifying aid approaches to build on social capital’s potential effects would produce important gains in the effort to address the major humanitarian crises of today and tomorrow--and finding such gains is the core objective of the WHS.
The Need for Social Capital (in the Oriental Economist)
Mortality rates from the 11 March 2011 tsunami varied tremendously across coastal cities; in some areas, no one was killed, while in other areas, as much as 1/10 of the population died. This article summarizes our publication from Social Science and Medicine to focus on the role that trust, networks, and social capital played in saving lives during disaster.
Elders Leading the Way to Resilience (with Emily Kiyota et al.)
The theory of change behind this project draws on multiple constructs, including elder empowerment, ibasho, community bonding, social capital, and community resilience. We argue that: 1. Empowering elders changes the way they feel about their role in their community 2. Creating the Ibasho Café (both physical and social infrastructures) with elders in a leadership role increases the community bonding among the members of all ages 3. A strong sense of community bonding increases the level of social network and community participation, enhancing the sense of belonging and trust, and developing reciprocity between neighbors 4. An enhanced sense of social capital strengthens the community’s resilience so it is better prepared to withstand future natural disasters and the impacts of global aging.
NCDMPH report from workshop: Learning to Build Resilience at the Neighborhood Level
Main points: 1. Building social capital in local communities may better prepare them for disaster recovery. 2. Neighborhoods can build social capital by forming neighborhood empowerment groups, for example, the Neighborhood Empowerment Network in San Francisco—these leverage leadership inherent in the neighborhood and increase social capital through relationship building. 3. Building social capital can be made accessible and fun by including diverse groups of people and encouraging participation in a variety of projects, including a tabletop exercise demonstrated during the session.
The physical and social determinants of mortality in the 3.11 tsunami published in Social Science and Medicine
The human consequences of the 3.11 tsunami were not distributed equally across the municipalities of the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. Instead, the mortality rate from the massive waves varied tremendously from zero to ten percent of the local residential population. What accounts for this variation remains a critical question for researchers and policy makers alike. This paper uses a new, sui generis data set including all villages, towns, and cities on the Pacific Ocean side of the Tohoku region to untangle the factors connected to mortality during the disaster. With data on demographic, geophysical, infrastructure, social capital, and political conditions for 133 municipalities, we find that tsunami height, stocks of social capital, and level of political support for the long-ruling LDP strongly influenced mortality rates. Given the high probability of future large scale catastrophes, these findings have important policy implications for disaster mitigation policies in Japan and abroad
Social Capital and Community Resilience published in American Behavioral Scientist
Despite the ubiquity of disaster and the increasing toll in human lives and financial costs, much research and policy remain focused on physical infrastructure–centered approaches to such events. Governmental organizations such as the DHS, FEMA, USAID, and United Kingdom’s DFID continue to spend heavily on hardening levees, raising existing homes, and repairing damaged facilities despite evidence that social, not
physical, infrastructure drives resilience. This article highlights the critical role of social capital and networks in disaster survival and recovery and lays out recent literature and evidence on the topic. We look at definitions of social capital, measurement and proxies, types of social capital, and mechanisms and application. The article concludes with concrete policy recommendations for disaster managers, government decision
makers, and nongovernmental organizations for increasing resilience to catastrophe through strengthening social infrastructure at the community level.
Review of Richard Samuels' book 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan (Cornell University Press 2013)
The book uses interviews with 70 or so Japanese and US government officials and hundreds of Japanese and English books, newspaper articles,
and government publications to map out three main discourses about the catastrophe. Samuels classifies these as “put it in gear,” “stay the course,” and “back to the future.” The “put it in gear” camp hoped to use the disaster as motivation to try out innovative policy approaches, while the “stay the course” camp envisioned the event as a one-in-a-million, black swan-type anomaly which did not require a change in direction...
The Politics of Natural Disasters for Oxford Bibliographies
Political scientists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, economists, and historians have studied disaster recovery, best practices in disaster response, the role of the government in rebuilding, and so forth. This annotated bibliography illuminates representative examples of the interdisciplinary work in this vast academic subfield. Most of the work that I have selected for inclusion comes from the end of the 20th century and early 21st century, but builds on the work of scholars such as Samuel Prince, who wrote about the 1917 Halifax harbor explosion three years later, and on mid-1950s and 1960s work sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Sections include general overviews, centers and data sources, comparative approach, case studies of individual disasters, recovery, natural, man-made, and natural/technological disasters, mitigation, preparation, and insurance, vulnerabilities, evacuation, emergent groups, disaster myths and behavior, humanitarian response, governance during and after, social capital in disaster recovery, political outcomes, political and economic impact, temporary housing, and resilience.
Post-Crisis Japanese Nuclear Policy: From Top-down Directives to Bottom-up Activism published in East West Center Asia Pacific Issues No. 103 January 2012
Over the past fifty years, Japan has developed one of the most advanced commercial nuclear power programs in the world. This is largely due to the government’s broad repertoire of policy instruments that have helped further its nuclear power goals. These top-down directives have resulted in the construction of 54 plants and at least the appearance of widespread support for nuclear power. By the 1990s, however, this carefully cultivated public support was beginning to break apart. And following the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 and resulting nuclear crisis in the Fukushima nuclear complex, the political and social landscape for energy in Japan has been dramatically altered. The crisis has raised and reinforced environmental concerns and health fears, as well as skepticism about information from government and corporate sources. A civil society that for decades has appeared weak and nonpartcipatory has awakened and citizens are carrying out bottom-up responses to the accident, effecting change with grassroots science and activism.
Future Fission: Why Japan Won’t Abandon Nuclear Power published in GlobalAsia
The nuclear plant disaster triggered by March’s earthquake and tsunami triggered soul-searching over its scale and the slow reaction. Some lay the blame on amakudari, a phrase describing the cozy relationship between Japanese government regulators and the industries they regulate. I explore these allegations and outline a range of reasons why Japan’s government will not waver from its commitment to champion nuclear energy.
The Tohoku Disaster: Crisis Windows, Complexity, and Social Capital published by the Social Science Research Council
At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake, known as the Higashi Nihon Daishinsai (Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster), struck roughly fifty miles off the coast of Japan’s mainland. While the Tohoku quake itself caused few fatalities, it set off a tsunami measuring up to forty-five-feet high, which not only devastated coastal and inland villages but also swamped the backup systems of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-reactor complex. This article investigates the disaster using several social science frames, including policy windows, complexity, and social capital.
Externalities of Strong Social Capital: Post Tsunami Recovery in Southeast Asia published in Journal of Civil Society
Much research has implied that social capital functions as an unqualified “public good,” enhancing governance, economic performance, and quality of life (Coleman 1988; Cohen and Arato 1992; Putnam 1993; Cohen and Rogers 1995). Scholars of disaster (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Adger et al. 2005; Dynes 2005; Tatsuki 2008) have extended this concept to posit that social capital provides nonexcludable benefits to whole communities after major crises. Using qualitative methods to analyze data from villages in Tamil Nadu, India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, this paper demonstrates that high levels of social capital simultaneously provided strong benefits and equally strong negative externalities, especially to those already on the periphery of society. In these villages, high levels of social capital reduced barriers to collective action for members of the uur panchayats (hamlet councils) and parish councils, speeding up their recovery and connecting them to aid organizations, but at the same time reinforced obstacles to recovery for women, Dalits, migrants, and Muslims. These localized findings have important implications for academic studies of social capital and policy formation for future disasters and recovery schemes.
Between Market and State: Directions in Social Science Research on Disaster in Perspectives on Politics
In this extended review, I discuss three recent books on disaster: Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability, and Learning edited by Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul ‘T Hart, Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response , edited by Howard Kunreuther and Micheel Useem, and The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters by Charles Perrow. All three books invoke the market and state as core forces at work in mitigation and disaster recovery, overlooking the critical role of social capital.
Separate and Unequal: Post-Tsunami Aid Distribution in Southern India published in Social Science Quarterly
Objective. Disasters are a regular occurrence throughout the world. Whether all eligible victims of a catastrophe receive similar amounts of aid from governments and donors following a crisis remains an open question. Methods. I use data on 62 similarly damaged inland fishing villages in five districts of southeastern India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to measure the causal influence of caste, location, wealth, and bridging social capital on the receipt of aid. Using two-limit tobit and negative binomial models, I investigate the factors that influence the time spent in refugee camps, receipt of an initial aid packet, and receipt of 4,000 rupees. Results. Caste, family status, and wealth proved to be powerful predictors of beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries during the aid process. Conclusion. While many scholars and practitioners envision aid distribution as primarily a technocratic process, this research shows that discrimination and financial resources strongly affect the flow of disaster aid.
The Power of People: Social Capital’s Role in Recovery from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake published in Natural Hazards
Despite the regularity of disasters, social science has only begun to generate replicable knowledge about the factors which facilitate post-crisis recovery. Building on the broad variation in recovery rates within disaster-affected cities, I investigate the ability of Kobe’s nine wards to repopulate after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. This article uses case studies of neighborhoods in Kobe alongside new time-series, cross-sectional data set to test five variables thought to influence recovery along with the relatively untested factor of social capital. Controlling for damage, population density, economic conditions, inequality and other variables thought important in past research, social capital proves to be the strongest and most robust predictor of population recovery after catastrophe. This has important implications both for public policies focused on reconstruction and for social science more generally.
Fixing Recovery: Social Capital in Post-Crisis Resilience in The Journal of Homeland Security June 2010
Disasters remain among the most critical events which impact residents and their neighborhoods; they have killed far more individuals than high salience issues such as terrorism. Unfortunately, disaster recovery programs run by the United States and foreign governments have not been updated to reflect a new understanding of the essential nature of social capital and networks. I call for a re-orientation of disaster preparedness and recovery programs at all levels away from the standard fixes focused on physical infrastructure towards ones targeting social infrastructure. The reservoirs of social capital and the trust (or lack thereof) between citizens in disaster-affected communities can help us understand why some neighborhoods in cities like Kobe, Japan, Tamil Nadu, India, and New Orleans, Louisiana displayed resilience while others stagnated. Social capital – the engine for recovery – can be deepened both through local initiatives and interventions from foreign agencies.
The Crucial Role of Civil Society in Disaster Recovery and Japan’s Preparedness for Emergencies in Japan aktuell 3/28
This article is concerned with the empirical puzzle of why certain neighborhoods and localities recover more quickly than others following disasters. It illuminates four mainstream theories of rehabilitation and resilience, and then investigates a neglected factor, namely the role of social networks and civil society. Initial analyses underscore the important role of trust and connectivity among local residents in the process of rebuilding. After examining the role of civil society in Japan’spreparedness for emergencies, the article concludes with some policy recommendations for governments and nongovernmental actors involved in disaster relief.