It's Who You Know: Factors Driving Recovery From Japan's 11 March 2011 Disaster

Abstract

The 11 March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake affected dozens of coastal communities along the shore of Japan's Tohoku region. Following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns, utilities, businesses and schools in some towns have bounced back to pre-disaster capacity while other municipalities have lagged behind. The question of which factors accelerate the recovery of business, infrastructure and population after the disaster remains unanswered. This article uses a new dataset of roughly 40 disaster-affected cities, towns and villages in the area to identify the factors connected with recovery. More than tsunami damage, spending on disaster mitigation, population density, economic conditions or financial capability, the most powerful predictor of recovery for a given area is the number of powerful politicians representing the area in the national government. These findings bring with them important policy implications for residents, NGOs and government decision-makers.

Same Threat, Different Responses: Experts Steering Politicians and Stakeholders in 2009 H1n1 Vaccination Policy‐making

“…Second, crises give elected leaders opportunities to demonstrate their value to contested constituencies. For instance, majority legislators in the US, India and Japan have disproportionally favoured their own districts with disaster assistance (Healy and Malhorta ; Cole et al ; Aldrich ). Similarly, after US presidents in 1988 gained unilateral authority to declare disasters, electorally competitive states were twice as likely as noncompetitive states to receive extraordinary Federal disaster funding (Reeves ).…”

Managing the Unexpected: Sense‐making in the Chinese Emergency Management System

“…In recent years, emergency management systems worldwide have been put to the test by natural disasters, terrorist threats, industrial and transport disasters (Comfort ; Helsloot et al ). In response, governments everywhere have reformed their institutions to improve their handling of these threats (Wise and Nader ; Wise ; May et al ; Lodge and Wegrich ; Aldrich ; Christensen et al ). China is no exception.…”

Risk Management Regime and Its Scope for Transition in Tokyo

“…Despite legal support for decentralization, including change to electoral institutions in 1994, the passage of the Non-Profit Organization Law (NPO Law), 1998 and the Decentralization Law, 2000, the risk management regime remains largely technocratic and top-down rather than innovative and proactive (Aldrich 2016). A senior manager at TMG summarized the common practices of policy making at TMG:…”

“…This has helped to build increased trust between citizens (Aldrich 2012(Aldrich , 2013Veszteg et al 2014;Hommerich 2012). Thus, despite the expectation of the post 3/11 Japan to break away from top-down, technocratic decision-making processes evidence shows limited institutional change towards a more inclusive national institutional framework (Samuels 2013;Aldrich 2011Aldrich , 2016Avenell 2016). If, as it seems, the post 3/11 era regime in Tokyo is rejecting fundamental transitions how fit is a still centralized and techno-centric risk management regime for anticipating the risks of climate change extremes?…”

“…The 1990s were a particular period of civic resurgence met by state cooption (Ogawa 2004). Since this period, bottom-up, community-based approaches for risk management and wider development agendas have become more prevalent and gained government support having proven themselves efficient in disaster reduction and recovery (Aldrich and Meyer 2015;Aldrich and Sawada 2015;Aldrich 2016;Nakagawa and Shaw 2004). The so-called '3/11' disasters following the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear incident in 2011, quickly led to a popular questioning of the role of central government, science, corporate private sector interests and citizens in strategic decision-making for risk management and its relationship with development.…”