The Wenchuan Earthquake recovery: Civil society, institutions, and planning

The importance and the theoretical significance of the civil society construct in the public sphere and its involvement in the policy decision-making process have long been emphasized by scholars in policy and planning. The theory itself has yet to deal with the role of a particular set of actors in civil society through a process of social change. My research approaches this piece of the social justice issue by defining a set of foundational problems called the "theoretical paradoxes of action": 1) If the institutions of planning exist to reduce uncertainty in our lives and thus provide social order, how do they deal with unexpected change? 2) If by definition, institutions exist to provide stability and meaning to social life, to what extent can they contribute to the ability of society to learn, adapt, and reorganize to meet urban challenges? This dissertation tackles this problem set from the perspective of civil society actors through a procedural-action-oriented approach, while taking into consideration of the diversity of planning cultures across countries.;I investigated the role of civil society in developing long-term collaborative efforts for urban settlements to cope with risks and uncertainties associated with catastrophic disasters. Using emerging citizen groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as the main unit of analysis, the primary intention of the study is to examine their role in forming communication and collaboration governance networks during the post-earthquake response and recovery period. It seeks to explore the experiences of social groups and organizations' participation during the initial three-year recovery process after the 2008 May12 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province, China. I adopted a case study methodology with a mixed-methods research design. The quantitative method utilizing social network analysis to look at the emergence and evolution of institutions inside the domain of civil society, their relational arrangements among each other, as well as to the state and the market domains at different points of time. The supplemental qualitative study of key participants representing group/organizational actors focused on in-depth understanding of the meaning and the driving forces of institutional change inside the civil society domain. Two types of contextual environments---communication and collaboration network structures---were being investigated along with a longitudinal study of their evolution over three time periods: before the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, immediate emergency response and short-term recovery period, and the longer-term (up to three years) recovery stage after the earthquake.;I further developed longitudinal network models in discovering the rules that governed the dynamic network behavior over the specified three periods of time. I utilized the SIENA program implemented in the R statistical system to longitudinally investigate: 1) Whether the institutional status in terms of actor registration had an effect on communication and collaboration behavior; 2) Whether there were structural tendencies that would affect the specific formation patterns of the communication and collaboration network development; 3) Whether the types of recovery activities that actors engaged in had an effect on the structural dynamics of the two types of networks; 4) Whether there were tendencies for the cross-mediation between communication and collaboration structures that facilitated the creation and maintenance of the two types of networks. With the supporting evidences from the qualitative data, the findings demonstrated the formation of a type of proactive coping style through which newly emerged group and organizational actors took the primary role in overcoming their differences in institutional status and in re-constructing a social structural environment that nurtured the long term social capacity in dealing with extreme distress or uncertainty. Throughout the different stages of network development, the group behavior self-generated a kind of change dynamics that prompted its own evolution, thus showing signs of endurance and transformation.;At last, I proposed for a preliminary conceptual framework to understand civil society actions in times of crisis. It depicted the development of a resilient social structure as a growth process and elaborated on the role of civil society in building resilient social structures as a coping and adapting mechanism when facing extreme uncertainties and changes. The dissertation contributed to the understanding of the meaning and role of civil society in driving the processes of institutional change as a learning process for social capacity-building. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).