Abstract
Government trust is an important manifestation of the legitimacy of government, which can reduce the cost of recovery policy implementation and improve the efficiency of reconstruction after natural hazards. Local government is the main force of post-disaster reconstruction in China. The villagers’ trust in local government plays an important role in post-disaster reconstruction. Therefore, enhancing the villagers’ trust in local government will greatly benefit the resilience of post-disaster reconstruction and the sustainable development of the disaster area. Through analyzing the data collected from a three-year (2009–2012) follow-up survey in Wenchuan after it was struck by an earthquake, we found that villagers’ trust toward the local government witnessed a significant decline. Low fairness in policy implementation, dense networks, and particularistic trust were the constraints that hindered the revitalization of trust in the local government. However, the economic improvement had no impact on the “trust in local government”. These results suggest that post-disaster recovery should involve more than the reconstruction of the economic performance, such as the fairness of policy implementation and the relief of negative effects of villagers’ social networks. Only when considering all of these factors will the sustainability of trust in local government be promoted and the reconstruction efficiency be enhanced in the process of disaster recovery.
Highlights
IntroductionNatural disasters have occurred frequently. As an important part of sustainable development, how to deal with post-disaster recovery and carry out post-disaster management have attracted more and more scholars’ attention
In recent years, natural disasters have occurred frequently
In the context of China’s “relational society”, this study focused on the villagers’ trust toward local government during disaster recovery, based on the influence of the social network on villagers’ evaluation of governmental policy implementation
Summary
Natural disasters have occurred frequently. As an important part of sustainable development, how to deal with post-disaster recovery and carry out post-disaster management have attracted more and more scholars’ attention. Emergency management is defined as the process of developing and implementing policies that are concerned with: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery [1]. These four phases are applicable to post-disaster management. Many scholars have explored the relationship between government trust and sustainable development after disaster [8,9]. They found that government trust has a significant impact on or a clear relationship with the economy [10,11], ecology [12], and society [13,14]. This study focused on discussing the relationship between trust in local government and post-disaster recovery
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