Abstract
Rural and peri-urban communities in Japan, as well as in many other regions of the world, face risks of discrete event natural phenomena, including earthquakes, floods, and landslides. They also face persistent disruptive stress due to risks that remain active over long durations, such as the loss of community capacities due to an aging population. This article describes my observations of and subsequent reflections on adaptive risk governance and community resilience building processes in two areas of western and southern Japan—Chizu in Tottori Prefecture and towns near Kumamoto City in Kumamoto Prefecture. Four aspects of adaptive risk governance from this limited set of observations stood out: (1) the importance of establishing a durable, patient process, (2) initiated and facilitated by a trusted figure, in (3) a space or venue accessible and open to the community, and (4) augmented by boundary objects that facilitate role playing, iteration, and ownership by the community of solutions generated in these dialogues.
Highlights
Societies across the world are continually confronted by the threat of natural hazard-induced and anthropogenic disasters arising from a variety of sources and occurring over a range of temporal and spatial scales
The process of governance of disaster risk and the decisions and actions taken by different institutions and individuals in communities at risk before, during, and after an event show considerable variation
The monk used the shelter as a space in which he could attend to the community’s social, emotional, and spiritual needs and facilitate a creative social process that was leading over time to the design for recovery and rebuilding of the community to a condition improved upon compared to its pre-earthquake status (Fig. 4)
Summary
Societies across the world are continually confronted by the threat of natural hazard-induced and anthropogenic disasters arising from a variety of sources and occurring over a range of temporal and spatial scales. In order to mitigate or adapt to risks, and to recover from and restore functionality after disasters, whether actual or potential events are global or local in origin, people and institutions at risk must engage in risk governance. This includes assessment, preparation, communication, response, recovery, and restoration appropriate to and effective in local conditions and culture. The Kumamoto area we visited was and is still in the process of recovery from a severe earthquake in 2016 Visiting these two places was a singular opportunity to observe the contexts and communities and to speak with people who had long been engaged in processes of dealing with both slowly-developing (for example, aging and declining community population) and rapid-onset (for example, earthquakes and landslides) threats.
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