The Relationship between a Sense of Ownership among Municipal Officials and Efficacy Assessments of Disaster Waste Management

Abstract

The objective of this study was to reveal the relationship between the individual sense of ownership among municipal officials in local governments and the efficacy of disaster waste management as an organization. This was done by conducting a questionnaire survey on individual ownership and efficacy assessment for the municipal governments in the Nankai Trough Earthquake disaster prevention area. The results of this relational analysis indicated that the efficacy of disaster waste management tends to be high in the basic municipalities, where the officials have a high sense of ownership. With regard to the Incident Command System framework, it was shown that even municipal officials whose governments had formulated a disaster waste management plan would find it difficult to improve the efficacy of disaster waste management if they exhibited a low sense of ownership. In other words, even beyond formulating a disaster waste management plan, the survey indicated that continuous efforts would be needed to foster a sense of ownership among municipal officials through human resource development for greater efficacy. This paper examines the importance of this sense of ownership in improving the efficacy of disaster waste management and confirms a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the connection.

Questionnaire on employee awareness of disaster mitigation measures in municipal governments

“…Although [4]- [7] have also conducted disaster-related questionnaires for municipal government officials, they were limited to specific areas of work, such as disaster waste management and shelter management during windstorms and floods. We were unable to identify any literature that analyzed questionnaire responses for all phases of disaster-related work by department, as was done in this study.…”