The Pattern of Policy Change on Disaster Management in China: A Bibliometric Analysis of Policy Documents, 1949–2016

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive review of China's policy system for the management of natural hazard-induced disasters from 1949 to 2016 through a quantitative bibliometric analysis of 5472 policy documents on such disasters. It identifies four phases of China's evolving disaster management system, which focused on agriculture, economic development, government and professional capacity building, and disaster governance, respectively. Characteristics of policies and contributing factors of policy change in each of the four phases are discussed in depth. This article provides a quantitative foundation for understanding the dynamic policy change of the disaster management system in China with a particular emphasis on the governance capacity and may serve as a basis for exploring the potential pathways of transformation according to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Toward Sustainable Development? A Bibliometric Analysis of PPP-Related Policies in China between 1980 and 2017

“…The cluster analysis was derived from the concept of betweenness centrality, which measured the time a node represented as an intermediary pathway between two other nodes. This meant that the keywords that were more connected to other keywords had a higher probability of staying in one subgroup [53,54]. As a result, these visualized clusters helped us easily identify the various focuses of the policies in the whole network.…”

“…Therefore, the pattern of policies can be identified [55,56]. (2) SNA has the advantage of presenting the power network between policy issuing departments in China [54,56,57]. Policies and regulations in China are individually or jointly issued by several departments, which implies a power network between departments: the more the policies and regulations issued or leading issued by certain department, the more significant power certain department possessed in this policy area.…”

Rapid Urban Land Expansion in Earthquake-Prone Areas of China

“…We recommend that the detection on active faults in urban areas should be further extended from large cities to those small cities in western China for a more comprehensive understanding of potential seismic risk. Meanwhile, it is crucial to create a unified standard for earthquake resistance and prevention and to implement necessary policies to guarantee the execution of the standard (Zhang et al 2018). Third, new technologies should be adopted to enhance seismic-risk management.…”

People-centered early warning systems in China: A bibliometric analysis of policy documents

“…This study employed co-word analysis and cluster analysis (see Fig. 1 ), which are commonly used in mapping research topics or in tracing the evolution of policy [ [34] , [35] , [36] , [37] ]. As a vital method of bibliometric analysis, co-word analysis assumes that a policy text's keywords constitute an adequate description of its content [ 34 ].…”

“…As a vital method of bibliometric analysis, co-word analysis assumes that a policy text's keywords constitute an adequate description of its content [ 34 ]. In the co-word network, degree centrality measures the strength of the relationships among high-frequency keywords [ 36 , 38 ], and it is also used to reflect the size of every keyword, that is, the nodes. Moreover, the frequency of the simultaneous occurrence of one keyword and other keywords measures the clusters.…”