Why do some communities recover faster than others following a disaster? Do these communities owe their postdisaster success to their quality of governance, to lower levels of disaster damage, or to greater levels of disaster assistance received? Do their predisaster population density or demographics matter in their recovery? How about their stocks of social capital? To what extent does that facilitate postdisaster recovery? In his book, Daniel P. Aldrich undertakes the difficult task of tackling these important questions in the disaster literature. He finds the most important factor that enables postdisaster recovery to be social capital.
Building Resilience builds on Aldrich’s earlier work on civil society, disasters, and public bads. The book is based on extensive research that he (and other researchers) conducted in several disaster contexts in Asia and the United States: Tokyo (Japan) after the 1923 earthquake, Kobe (Japan) after the 1995 earthquake, the state of Tamil Nadu (India) after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and New Orleans (United States) after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. The book draws on quantitative data based on multiple sources (e.g., Tokyo Metropolitan Police, New Orleans Housing Department) as well as a large number of surveys, in-depth interviews, historical research and review of secondary sources.
The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 details the role of social capital in postdisaster recovery in comparison to other factors that may explain differences in the recovery rates of communities affected by disasters (e.g., level of damage or aid, socioeconomic conditions). Chapter 2 provides an excellent review of the social capital literature by focusing on its intellectual history, its measurement, its Janus faces, and its link with disasters. Chapters 3 through 6 present the case studies from Japan, India, and the United States. Among the case study chapters, Chapter 3 uses original material on the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, whereas Chapters 4, 5, and 6 draw on the author’s previously published work. The final Chapter 7 includes a concrete set of policy recommendations on how to build and sustain social capital “through indigenous efforts” and “through foreign intervention” (p. 23).
Building Resilience is noteworthy on several fronts. It is the first scholarly book completely dedicated to the topic of social capital and disasters, an understudied topic in the literature. Moreover, it offers an intellectually honest perspective on the consequences of social capital. The mainstream literature typically presents social capital as a “public good” without questioning its downsides. However, social capital could have downsides. As shown by Aldrich, it could slow down the recovery of those who are not part of the social networks (e.g., Dalits, women, and other minorities in India) and push “unwanted facilities into the backyards of less cohesive networks of residents” (p. 23) (e.g., trailers in the United States) in the context of postdisaster recovery. The book also deserves praise for its comparative research on social capital and disasters across four disasters in three different countries. An additional strength is its mixed-methods approach which blends together quantitative (e.g., process tracing, time series, and propensity score matching) and qualitative analysis. The author also needs to be commended for his efforts to enhance the replicability of his research by making his data available to other researchers and interested parties for free (through his own Website and online data-storage sites).
The readers of the book, however, would benefit from a more in-depth discussion of a few key issues. The first key issue relates to the operationalization and measurement of social capital. Aldrich measures social capital in a number of ways. At the community level, he uses the proxies of voter turnout rates (Tokyo earthquake, Hurricane Katrina), the number of political demonstrations per year (Tokyo earthquake), and the number of nonprofit organizations created per capita (Kobe earthquake). At the individual/household level, which he examines only for the Indian Ocean tsunami, Aldrich measures social capital by relief aid received and contact with government (bridging social capital), as well as by the number of funerals attended and the amount of money given at weddings (bonding social capital). The author attributes the lack of consistency in his measures of social capital across the case studies to the culture-specific nature of social capital, to the lack of agreed-upon measures of social capital, and to data limitations (pp. 41–42). All of these are valid points, given the comparative nature of Aldrich’s research. The readers, however, are left wondering about the validity of the conclusions of the book on social capital and disasters (as well as the generalizability of the book’s findings), given how dissimilar its social capital measures are.
The second key issue has to do with the measurement of the book’s other key concept: postdisaster recovery. As with social capital, several proxies are used for measuring recovery. The proxies used for recovery at the community level range from population growth rate (Tokyo and Kobe earthquakes) to the number of trailers in a zip code and the number of trailer parks (Hurricane Katrina) to the length of time spent in relief camps, the percentage of eligible families receiving the initial bundle of relief supplies, and the percentage of eligible families receiving 4,000 rupees in assistance (Indian Ocean tsunami). In addition, the book measures recovery at the individual/household level by family relief amount received in the context of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Recovery is certainly a complex, multifaceted, and long process, which is hard to measure. In that sense, the book could have benefited greatly from focusing on one or two aspects of recovery (e.g., population and/or housing recovery), rather than trying to address its different dimensions in different postdisaster contexts studied.
The third key issue concerns the attention given to qualitative research by Aldrich. He conducted yearlong fieldwork in Japan and India and lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. He conducted archival research to study the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and interviewed 77 individuals from nongovernmental organizations, local governments, academic institutions, and consulting and planning firms in his case study sites (see Appendix 2 for details). He also had access to transcriptions of 80 additional interviews conducted by the Indian social service agencies in the state of Tamil Nadu. Therefore, the book could have provided more breadth and thicker description on the four postdisaster contexts.
Despite these issues, the book makes a significant contribution to the disaster and social capital literatures. It is a thought-provoking read not only for political scientists but also for other social scientists with an interest in social capital and/or disasters. The book is also quite informative for international agencies and government agencies involved in disaster relief, recovery, and mitigation, as well as with residents of disaster-prone or affected areas, as it shows how “social capital, like other resources, can be nurtured through both local initiatives and foreign interventions” (p. ix).
