BUILDING RESILIENCE: SOCIAL CAPITAL IN POST‐DISASTER RECOVERY ‐ by Daniel P. Aldrich
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Author | Andreas Duit |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12088 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
514 REVIEWS
BUILDING RESILIENCE: SOCIAL CAPITAL IN POST-DISASTER RECOVERY
Daniel P. Aldrich
Chicago University Press, 2012, 248 pp., £18.25 (pb), ISBN: 9780226012889
It might seem that it was only a matter of time before one of social science’s most versatile
explanatory frameworks – social capital theory– would be employed to explain one of the
most rapidly trending concepts in social science – resilience. This is, in a nutshell, what
Daniel P. Aldrich does in his recent book, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster
Recovery. Despite the seemingly inevitable convergence of social capital and resilience
theory, the result is quite fascinating and carries implications far beyond the book’s
nominal focus on post-disaster recovery management. In particular, Aldrich’s book offers
important lessons about how small differences in the pattern of society’s fabric can have
profound implications for how well communities and societies are able to cope with
shocks when they hit, as well as for how they are able to rebuild their communities after
the disaster.
Aldrich’s work is an example of social science at its best: It is methodologically
sophisticated, based on a comprehensive collection of original data, is highly engaged in
the issues it is analysing, uses a mixed method approach, and has an honest ambition to
deliver policy-relevant advice. As such it delivers a genuine contribution to the discipline
and might also help to improve the way in which disaster management is carried out on
the ground.
The empirical backbone of the book consists of findings from four case studies of post-
disaster recovery: the 1923 Tokyo earthquake; the 1995 earthquake in Kobe; Hurricane
Katrina in New Orleans in 2005; and the southern Indian region of Tamil Nadu after
the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004. Aldrich employs a diverse and often innovative set
of methodological approaches for gathering data on independent (social capital) and
dependent variables (post-disaster recovery, or resilience). Social capital is measured
with a range of proxies (such as civic society organizations at the neighbourhood level,
voter turnout, and political demonstrations), and always with a high degree of contextual
sensitivity.
Resilience is defined as ‘a neighborhood’s capacity to weather crises such as disasters
and engage in effective and efficient recovery through coordinated efforts and cooperative
activities’ (p. 7). Resilience is thus more or less synonymous with ‘recovery’, or the extent
to which a community is able to ‘bounce back’ after being hit by a disturbance. Resilience
is operationalized in several different ways, such as population changes after earthquakes
within city areas (Tokyo and Kobe), FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
trailer homes per capita (New Orleans), or the ability to attract post-disaster assistance
(Tamil Nadu villages).
In all cases Aldrich finds strong support for the hypothesis that social capital is highly
influential for how much and how fast societies are able to recover, rebuild, and sometimes
even improve after having been hit by a disaster. In addition, Aldrich uncovers a dark side
of social capital in post-disaster recovery: communities with higher levels of social capital
were able to stave off unwanted FEMA trailers from their New Orleans neighbourhoods;
close-knit social networks in Tamil Nadu excluded marginalized groups and individuals
from access to aid relief; and high levels of bonding social capital can be linked to
massacres of Korean immigrants in the wake of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Social capital
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 2, 2014 (512–517)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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