Rebuilding the Foundations: Local Governance and Democratic Citizenship in Post-Earthquake Nepal

Disasters are often seen as something extraordinary—an ‘act of God.’ However, disaster researchers have highlighted the human dimensions of disaster management, including variation in social, political, and economic factors that affect how hazards like earthquakes and rains are experienced by people and communities. This project advances this research by centering the political economy of disaster management, and particularly the local political economy of post-disaster reconstruction, to understand the process of reconstruction as an interaction of demand-side factors, including citizen attribution of responsibility and trust, and supply-side factors, including histories of local institutions, resources, and governing elite. The project’s proposed theoretical framework enables the further theorization of variation in subnational disaster management using insights from public goods and service provisioning like roads, schools, and water.

For the main empirical contributions of this project, I focus on three in-depth, subnational case studies in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal—the urban centers of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur—after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake using novel data from over 120 in-depth interviews, a survey and survey experiment (n = 1800), observation, and archival work. I develop and test the project’s central theoretical argument, namely that post-disaster reconstruction is dependent on pre-disaster local governance structures and that the process occurs in an acute market of labor, materials, and ideas. Whether the reconstruction process is a directed, centrally-led endeavor or a variegated, neighborhood-level process depends on the locality’s governance structure and extant resources–both material and nonmaterial–from which the community draws. I explore this argument both at the individual level—through variation in citizen expectations of the state towards reconstruction—and at the level of the urban municipality. In essence, this theory is a theory of variation in local post-disaster resilience. Yet, resilience here is defined not in a binary success or lack of success, but rather as a procedural concept whereby reconstruction processes can vary based on who rebuilds, what is rebuilt, and how structures are rebuilt.

The implications of this theory and the larger framework of disaster management and reconstruction as a public good or service extend beyond environmental policy narrowly understood. Processes of preparation for and reconstruction after natural hazards are a part of larger policy feedback loops in the sense that residents conceptualize disaster management and reconstruction as a public good or service that is the responsibility of the state. This means that citizens have expectations of the state vis-a-vis disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction, and that their relationship to the state can affect and be affected by the implementation of their locality’s disaster policies and reconstruction processes. Understanding variation in local processes of disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction is thus important in itself as well as critical for understanding the trajectory of state-society relationships, active citizenship, and local governance in hazard-prone settings across the globe.

灾害常被视为反常之事，即“天灾”。然而，灾害研究学者已强调灾害治理中的人文维度，包括影响民众与社区感知地震、降雨等灾害的社会、政治与经济因素差异。本研究聚焦灾害治理的政治经济学，尤其是灾后重建的地方政治经济学，将重建过程理解为需求侧因素与供给侧因素的互动：前者包括民众对责任的归因与信任，后者涵盖地方制度沿革、资源禀赋与治理精英群体，以此推进相关研究。本研究提出的理论框架，可借助道路、学校、供水等公共物品与服务供给的相关理论视角，进一步推进次国家级灾害治理差异的理论化研究。

就本研究的主要实证贡献而言，我以2015年尼泊尔廓尔喀地震后的加德满都谷地（含加德满都、拉利特普尔与巴克塔普尔三座城市中心）为研究场景，选取三个次国家级深度案例展开研究，数据来源包括120余份深度访谈、一项样本量为1800的调查与调查实验、实地观察及档案资料。我将构建并检验本研究的核心理论命题：灾后重建依赖震前地方治理结构，且重建过程发生于劳动力、物资与理念的活跃市场之中。重建究竟是自上而下的统一推进工程，还是多元分散的社区级行动，取决于该地区的治理结构以及社区可获取的既有物质与非物质资源。我将分别从个体层面（通过民众对国家灾后重建的期待差异）与城市市政层面验证这一命题。本质而言，该理论是关于地方灾后韧性差异的理论。但此处的韧性并非以二元的“成功/失败”来定义，而是作为一种程序性概念，即重建过程可因重建主体、重建对象与重建方式的不同而存在差异。

该理论以及“将灾害治理与重建视为公共物品或服务”的整体分析框架，其启示意义远超狭义的环境政策范畴。自然灾害的防灾准备与灾后重建过程属于更大范围的政策反馈循环的一部分：民众将灾害治理与重建视为国家应承担责任的公共物品或服务。这意味着民众对国家在灾害治理与灾后重建方面存在特定期待，而民众与国家的关系既会影响地方灾害政策与重建进程的实施，也会受其影响。因此，理解地方灾害治理与灾后重建进程的差异，不仅本身具有重要学术价值，也有助于理解全球范围内灾害高风险地区的国家-社会关系轨迹、积极公民参与及地方治理的发展路径。