Surveying Post-Disaster Collaborative Governance Across Three Polities: Construction and Test Data from an English-Japanese-Mandarin Chinese Tri-Lingual Instrument

Collaborative Governance (CG) attempts to establish principles for post-disaster recovery based on engagement between government and society. Previous models have theorized its components, but assessments of its generalizability and validity have been limited by a lack of quantitative studies across different populations, and difficulties regarding instrumentalizing key concepts. Using different languages also presents the challenge of meaning equivalency of question items. An original, tri-lingual instrument in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and English tapped sample populations in Japan, Taiwan, and Australia, and inquired about pre-Covid disaster experience, economic impacts from past disaster, CG experiences from that time, and comparisons between past CG experience and Corona government cooperation. CG question items were based on five components from the literature: Systems, Resources, Trust, Motivation, and Attachment. Small- and medium-size businesses were targeted so “recovery” meant a return to profitability. Meaning equivalency among questions was examined through an examination of psychometric properties of each language scale, construct validity, and concurrent validity. Validity testing also provided some evidence for the generalizability of CG models.