Social capital, trust, and collective action in post-earthquake Nepal
- PDF / 1,083,725 Bytes
- 29 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 2 Downloads / 215 Views
Social capital, trust, and collective action in post‑earthquake Nepal Veeshan Rayamajhee1 · Alok K. Bohara2 Received: 26 September 2019 / Accepted: 29 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract According to the first generation of theories of collective action, utility-maximizing individuals encountering conditions of nonexcludability and nonrivalry free ride rather than cooperate as their dominant strategy. But scholars have documented innumerable successful and unsuccessful collective action efforts after disasters around the world that contradict that idea. We square the findings of disaster research with the second generation of collective action research by demonstrating how important social capital is for understanding voluntary collective action. We apply structural equation modeling and mediation analysis to data we collected from Sindhupalchowk, Nepal, after its 2015 earthquake to show that bonding social capital has the mediated effect of engendering mutual trust and in turn enabling collective action. Further, we demonstrate direct effects of both bonding and bridging/linking social capital on collective action following disasters. We portray social capital as essential in enabling self-governance and fostering resilience in postdisaster scenarios in which the collective burdens of reconstruction and recovery necessitate concerted efforts on the part of the private sector, citizens, and public institutions. Keywords Disasters · Collective action · Social capital · Trust · Resilience · Nepal
1 Introduction1 Postdisaster recovery requires private firms, public institutions, and, above all, citizens to cooperate. That means that recovery by households and communities is a collective action problem (CAP), and it is one that necessitates collaboration at various levels. To achieve recovery, many factors come into play. For example, businesses must be prepared to 1 An earlier version of this paper is available as a chapter in the lead author’s PhD thesis (referenced throughout). Please see chapter 3 in Rayamajhee (2019). The paper has undergone substantive revisions since then.
* Veeshan Rayamajhee [email protected] 1
Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics, North Dakota State University, NDSU Dept. 7610, P. O. Box 6050, Fargo, ND 58108‑6050, USA
2
Department of Economics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Natural Hazards
reopen, public and private institutions must coordinate, and residents must return quickly to the community. The stock of social capital in a community determines each of these factors, whether indirectly or directly. If a community has little social capital, it may well not be able to coordinate at all the requisite levels. The literature on natural disasters shows that social capital may help determine resilience after disasters (Buckland and Rahman 1999; Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Aldrich 2012a; Storr et al. 2015). One such study, Aldrich (2012b), attempts to show that social capital is a more important determina
Data Loading...
