EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.40

Author

Daniel P. Aldrich is associate professor and University Scholar at Purdue University and, during the 2012-2013 academic year, a Fulbright research professor at Tokyo University. He was an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow at USAID during the 2011-2012 academic year. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Tokyo’s Law Faculty in Japan, an Advanced Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Program on US-Japan Relations, a Visiting Researcher at Centre Américain, Sciences Po in Paris, France and a Visiting Professor at the Tata Institute for Disaster Management in Mumbai, India.

His research interests include post-disaster recovery, the siting of controversial facilities, the interaction between civil society and the state, and the socialization of women and men through experience. His work has been discussed in New York Times, CNN , the State Department’s Media Hub, the National Bureau of Asian Research, etc. On May 2011 the Purdue Exponent named him among the “Top 5 Professors who have influenced international and national events.” In July 2012 his New York Times Op-Ed on disaster recovery was named as one of the five best columns in the Atlantic Wire.

Daniel’s first book, Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West, was published by Cornell University Press in 2008 and was republished (as a 2nd edition paperback) in May 2010 and was translated into Japanese by Sekaishisosha Publishers. The book has been reviewed in more than 18 journals and on several blogs. It has been mentioned by French Nonfiction and Greenfieldoptimist and Japan Focus as well.

His second book Building Resilience: Social Capital in Disaster Recovery was published in the summer of 2012 by the University of Chicago Press. Additional publications on disaster recovery include “Strong Civil Society as a Double-Edged Sword:Siting Trailers in Post-Katrina New Orleans” with Kevin Crook in Political Research Quarterly, “Social, Not Physical, Infrastructure: The Critical Role of Civil Society after the 1923 Tokyo Earthquake” in the Journal Disasters (this paper won the best paper award from the Public Policy Section), “Fixing Recovery: Social Capital in Post-Crisis Resilience” in The Journal of Homeland Security, “Separate but Unequal: Post Tsunami Aid Distribution in Southern India” in Social Science Quarterly, “The Power of People: Social Capital’s Role in Recovery from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake” in Natural Hazards, “The Externalities of Strong Social Capital: Post-Tsunami Recovery in Southeast India” in Journal of Civil Society, and a review of several books on disaster in Perspectives on Politics.

Abstract

Disasters of all types remain among the most likely hazards residents around the world will encounter. The costs of disasters in terms of suffering and economic outcomes in developing and developed nations continue to rise. Much policy focus continues on measures to increase physical infrastructure preparedness and repair. In contrast, little research has sought to illuminate the ways that societal and state characteristics — such as government capacity and levels of societal trust — interact in post-disaster environments. Using four qualitative case studies, this paper underscores that the role played by government and civil society in crisis situations and the need to better understand the interaction between norms, trust, and political institutions. The results bring important policy ramifications for decision makers, international development assistance, and citizens alike.

Introduction

Recent disasters — such as the 3/11 compounded disaster in Tohoku, Japan, the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand, and the 2013 earthquake in Sichuan China — continue to drive home the widespread problem of vulnerability to disaster. Regardless of levels of industrialization and development, nations face severe challenges in preparing for and responding to disasters such as earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, mudslides, and other catastrophes. As we move further into the 21st century, crises triggered by complex technological systems interacting with nature – such as nuclear power plants which have lost multiple cooling systems due to external shocks – will further challenge the capabilities of elected leaders. As seen in the BP oil spill in the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off the Gulf Coast of the United States and the hydrogen explosions, fuel meltdowns, and leakage of radioactive materials at Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors in Ōkuma and Futaba, Japan, the “wicked problems” of disaster mitigation and management continue to expand. These challenges serve as wicked problems because of their unstructured, cross-cutting, and relentless nature; that is, they involve complex ripple effects, have multiple stakeholders, and cannot be solved “once and for all” (see Weber and Khademian 2008 and Head 2008 for an overview of this type of policy challenge).

Figure 1 (below) details the increasing number of natural disasters over the 20th and early 21st centuries. Note specifically how the number of disasters recorded for roughly the first half of the 20th century remained flat, at fewer than 30 per year. However, with the global trends of development gains, population increase, and urbanization during the post-World War II period, the number of yearly disasters skyrocketed to reach more than 370 per year by the early 21st century. While the number of deaths per disaster has actually been decreasing, the property damage, opportunity costs, and economic consequences of this increase have taken their toll on nations around the world. Scholars have argued that in 2011, the total costs of natural disasters around the world reached more than 380 billion US dollars (Mysiak et al 2012), and these financial costs are separate from the 60,000 or so lives lost each year primarily in developing nations to collapsed buildings following earthquakes (Kenny 2012). Scholars have also estimated that large scale disasters, such as the 1995 Kobe earthquake in the Kansai region of Japan, lowered household incomes by 15 percent for periods as long as 15 years after the event (DuPont and Noy 2012).

Figure 1. Increasing number of natural disasters over the past century

■ Note: Data from EM-DAT

Much policy work at the national and international level remains fixated on physical infrastructure and physical preparedness for disaster. Guidelines for vulnerable residents stress individual preparation of food and water and short-term responses such as sandbagging vulnerable properties. Engineering standards for homes and high rises continue to tighten and planners in many advanced democracies have sought to move populations away from vulnerable communities. For example, the densely-populated urban center of Wellington — the capital of New Zealand — sits atop multiple active faults, and as a result, decision makers in the 1970s decided to significantly tighten building codes. As many of the buildings in the city had been completed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, preparing the overall urban area for future quakes meant tearing down older buildings and reinforcing the remaining ones through building techniques such as lead dampers and rubber bearings (Site visit to Wellington NZ April 2013). Kiwi engineers continue to check some 4000 public and commercial buildings in the city and have issued hundreds of “section 124” notices which require owners to reinforce or demolish earthquake-prone buildings within a set period of time (see http://quake.howison.co.nz/ for details). Another example of the physical-infrastructure focused work on disaster mitigation comes from policy responses to the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes which began in September 2010 and continued through the 22 February 2011 quake which killed 185 people. The collapse of multistory office buildings in Christchurch caused the largest number of fatalities and the central government worked through new organizations such as the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) to “red zone” the downtown area. In doing so, CERA has sealed the area from occupancy until unstable commercial and residential buildings can be demolished and new ones completed.

Many disasters have triggered similar built-environment policy foci from decision makers around the world. After the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which killed almost a quarter-million people across Southeast Asia, the Government of India ordered all coastal residents to move 5 km back from the water. For many fishermen, this distance prevented them from effectively carrying out their livelihoods on the ocean and they ignored the order, choosing to remain in their vulnerable homes. Similarly, in Tohoku, Japan, the central government continues to fund dual-type responses to the 3/11 compounded disaster. Because many communities are divided about potential relocation plans involving cutting down local mountains and moving existing houses to newly created higher ground, Tokyo has funded both the creation of new sea walls and the relocation of homes...(Continued)