Six International Level: How Institutions Save Lives Purchased

A brief look away from Japan provides insights into why a close, comparative understanding of the levels of governance in countries facing disasters is critical. On August 26, 2008, Hurricane Gustav barreled through the Caribbean, causing more than $8 billion in damage to the area. Authorities in some nations labeled it the worst in 50 years. After passing through the Caribbean, its storm track took it over the US mainland, causing Mayor Ray Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, the first since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. With winds ranging from 75 to 155 mph as it made landfall, Gustav knocked over buildings, downed power lines, and flooded businesses and homes. When the storm subsided, it was clear that its effects on the nations in the Caribbean had varied tremendously. The same storm that killed 8 people in the Dominican Republic—primarily in a mudslide that killed an entire extended family—slew 77 in Haiti, whose fourth largest city, Gonaives, was completely flooded. The UN special representative to Haiti told the New York Times, “What I saw in this city today is close to hell on earth.”¹Close

Further, the nearby nation of Cuba—which evacuated more than 300,000 people in the path of the 155 mph winds—suffered no fatalities whatsoever, despite an increase in wind speeds as the hurricane passed over that island. Given that the same storm system pounded all three nations, the difference in the number of casualties is striking. Observers pointed out that different governance structures across the Caribbean resulted in different outcomes from an identical threat. While each nation had set up institutions and procedures to keep their inhabitants safe from harm, some had done a better job than others.

This chapter puts Japan’s 3/11 disasters and government responses in context at the international level. Yearly, countries around the world face a variety of hazards and crises, with extreme weather events, flooding, and typhoons among the most common. As we saw with Hurricane Gustav, while damage does not stop at national borders, individual nations have varying levels of civil defense structures and procedures, infrastructure resilience, and preparedness. Those characteristics can magnify or diminish the impact of a hazard. Japan’s institutional structures and high-capacity government, despite governance challenges such as the top-down and cookie-cutter responses described in chapter 5,²Close allowed it to minimize mortality during its triple disasters in 2011. Other countries facing similar or lesser-scale earthquakes in recent years have seen far more causalities and slower responses. At the country level, an obvious question is the degree to which factors such as governance, as we have stressed throughout the book, influence disaster outcomes.

As I have argued at the individual, municipal, and prefectural levels, neither the intensity of a disaster nor the aid provided afterward is strongly connected with outcomes such as survival and recovery. Instead, the strength of a nation’s governance, especially in terms of rule of law and regulatory quality,³Close serve as better predictors for overall disaster outcomes. Countries with more stable governments have lower death tolls and economic losses.⁴Close More developed countries—those with higher incomes, for example—also demonstrate lower vulnerability to disaster.⁵Close These more resilient countries create better mitigation and preventive measures—such as stronger building codes, early warning systems, disaster preparedness training, well-equipped hospitals, better transportation infrastructure, and better-trained doctors—along with more active civil society organizations such as volunteer firefighters, faith-based organizations, and philanthropic and outreach groups that seek to assist others during crises. These well-governed countries encourage innovation, but also welcome feedback on policies and allow watchdogs outside the government to push them toward better policies.

To better understand the relationship between governance and disaster outcomes, I tracked the standardized number of fatalities per year over more than a decade, from 1995 until 2005, in 160 countries, using figures available from the disaster data repository known as EM-DAT, known more formally as the International Disaster Database. EM-DAT has compiled information on thousands of disasters around the world, using government agencies and NGOs along with insurance companies, to learn about the types of disasters that have occurred, the numbers of lives they have claimed, and their economic impacts. While no dataset is perfect, EM-DAT is the gold standard when experts want to understand large-scale patterns among disasters over time and across countries.

Precisely what to measure in terms of disaster impact, though, remains somewhat unclear. Rather than simply measuring the number of dead after a major storm, mudslide, earthquake, or other disaster, I normalized the score by controlling for the size of the country’s population. Two hundred dead in a nation of hundreds of millions holds a different significance than the same number of fatalities in a small island nation. More specifically, I took the natural log of the number of disaster deaths divided by population. I used this standardized mortality rate and sought to connect it to one measure of governance: how much each government spent on services such as health care and education. Richer countries tend to spend more on public goods, services, and social protections than poorer ones, but not always. Even poorer countries can decide to invest in safety nets for their citizens.

Figure 6.1 isolates a few countries in a single calendar year and puts their data in the broader context of all the countries in EM-DAT. The downward-sloping line shows the general relationship between governance—here measured as government spending on social protections as a proportion of a country’s GDP—and standardized mortality rate in disasters. The shaded area around the line is the 95% confidence interval into which we believe most real-life observations would fall. The higher the country on the y-axis, the more people have passed away due to disasters (controlling for the size of the country). The farther the country lies along the x-axis, the more it has spent on social protections. While I’ve deleted a number (actually, most) of the available individual country observations for readability—otherwise the graph becomes an unreadable blob—it is quite clear that there is a relationship between these two factors.⁶Close Countries that spend more money on policies such as education and health care can reduce their vulnerability to disaster. For example, Haiti has extremely high disaster

mortality rates compared with other countries and very low levels of spending on social protections. In contrast, countries such as Poland, Brazil, and Germany have invested more in their citizens and can keep them relatively safe from harm. Japan spends an average of 17% of its GDP on these kinds of expenditures. In this way, governance has a clear effect on disaster mortality.

To make sure that these results are not a function of this one measure of governance, which may be linked to country wealth, I bring in another figure, which displays how mortality in disasters connects with a more direct measure of governance; namely, the Polity IV Democracy Score. This score is actually an index that captures components such as political competition, constraints on the executive branch, and processes of executive recruitment. Countries that have hereditary monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, would receive the lowest possible score, −10, while countries with democracies, such as Poland and Japan, would receive a 10, the highest.

Figure 6.2 uses the same handful of nations to illustrate the connection between governance and mortality rate in disasters: nations that are more democratic have fewer casualties from disasters. In fact, Haiti was so far to the left of the other countries in terms of its democracy

score that I had to drop it from the figure for the sake of readability. These results confirm past research that has linked higher institutional quality in government to fewer consequences from disasters.⁷Close

Japan scored high on both measures of governance: government expenditure on social protections (around 17%) and democracy (10 on a −10 to +10 scale). As we have seen in previous chapters, following the 3/11 triple disasters, the Japanese government’s responses were rapid and measured despite the destruction of much critical infrastructure, the deaths of nearly 19,000 residents, and anxiety about radiation. Early warning systems, disaster training, and strong building codes saved lives in Tōhoku and across the nation. The Japanese government sent in more than 100,000 Self Defense Force troops alongside hundreds of thousands of police officers, foreign troops, and domestic and international medical teams to respond to the event. Rapid provision of medical care meant that many individuals who might have died from treatable ailments, such as hypothermia, survived the event. Along with a strong and focused emergency policy response from authorities, local citizens in places such as Rikuzentakata, Watari, and Kesennuma worked to save one another and move the recovery forward. Further, Tōhoku residents ensured that societal stability remained: there were no reports of looting, increased crime, or other socially damaging behaviors.

Japan’s government response to disaster stands in sharp contrast with those of some other disaster-affected nations. The government of Haiti struggled to respond to the January 2010 earthquake, and its poor governance did little to alleviate the looting, food riots, and public mob justice meted out following the quake. After the Great Sichuan Earth quake in 2008, the Chinese government ignored citizen cries for stronger building codes in schools while speeding up physical infrastructure recovery and ignoring social infrastructure. The differences in disaster outcomes, such as mortality rates, and in post-disaster social coordination and mobilization speak to the importance of additional factors beyond the strength of the catastrophe and the robustness of physical infrastructure. Through case studies of three nations with regular exposure to disasters—China, India, and Haiti—and with different combinations of governance and state capacity, this chapter illustrates how these national-level government characteristics influence disaster outcomes and responses.

Scholarship on governance has emphasized that the structure of a government and its quality of governance are often functions of the interaction between the state and civil society. Societies with better governance—that is, where civil society groups, NPOs, and other non-state actors work independently and in collaboration or competition with the state—show higher potential for economic growth and for better policy management.⁸Close One study of French government policies in the 1970s and 1980s illustrated the need for feedback from civil society in achieving good governance.⁹Close Where groups in civil society could push back against poorly designed plans or work collectively to support nascent ones, the French government developed better policies. Similarly, research on the siting of controversial facilities such as garbage dumps and airports showed how negative feedback from affected communities halted what would have been less effective plans and forced developers to rethink their assumptions.¹⁰Close Broadly, nations with higher spending on social safety nets and more democratic governance encourage the flourishing of civil society, which in turn cultivates more responsive governance.

This chapter, which builds on such research, emphasizes the relationship between the government and civil society as critical to good governance. In the same way that direct measures of spending on social protections, political competition, and democracy can capture elements of governance, so too can measures of the capacity of the central government and its openness to civil society. Societies where citizens can access decision makers, have their opinions heard, and alter state policies to a significant degree are classified as having open input structures. In such countries, citizens and politicians engage in constructive disagreement, and civil servants and government officials remain embedded in positive and negative feedback loops. Residents’ feedback may alter plans set in place, and popular support for new policies can result in their enlargement. The head of the Safecast citizen science organization observed that Fukushima communities with more active civil society groups had more radiation monitoring stations installed by local authorities. Local governments had to demonstrate to residents who regularly asked about their safety and pressed them for information that they were taking their concerns seriously. That is, pressure from an active and engaged citizenry altered public policy and made the decision makers more responsive to local concerns.

In contrast, nations where decision makers are more insulated from the public, where only certain interests are heard (if any), and where inputs from citizens are ignored or overlooked have closed input structures. In such states, residents may respond angrily to plans for unwanted facilities such as chemical factories or large-scale developments that uproot them from long-established neighborhoods, but have little chance of altering the proposals. In states with closed input structures, decision makers may feel threatened by negative responses and can use censorship or coercive force to end criticism of their policies. Such states may be able to collect less in taxes (as citizens distrust their intentions) and may spend less on social protections as well.

Scholarship has shown a tight link between the ability of citizens to have their voices heard and broader trust in the government. In societies where citizens have low efficacy and believe their ideas and desires will not permeate into actual policy, they tend to have lower trust in government. In turn, lower trust creates less desire to monitor and police decision makers, who may then do even less to enact the general will. A negative spiral can arise in which citizens disengage from their own government and lose trust in authorities, thereby making government itself more insular and aloof. In Italy, for example, northern authorities interacted positively with civil society groups over hundreds of years, beginning more than a millennium ago, creating an environment that facilitated trade, economic growth, and innovation. By drawing citizens into the governance sphere and encouraging their participation, medieval authorities created long-lasting norms for horizontal ties and vertical trust. In contrast, southern government authorities did little to encourage the public’s faith in their activities and became less responsive to their needs over time, setting the stage for stunted growth.¹¹Close

Alongside its interaction with civil society, we can judge a government by its capacity.¹²Close The most basic form of capacity relates to a government’s monopoly over legitimate force, based on Weber’s definition: “The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.”¹³Close Pragmatically, states need to be able to control events within their borders and prevent rival groups—whether terrorists, political opponents, or other domestic interest groups willing to use violence—from effectively challenging their rule. Somalia, for example, serves as a core example of a failed or low-capacity state because of the government’s inability to keep warlords from controlling trade, exchange, and police functions.¹⁴Close

Beyond coercive force, scholarship has further characterized state capacity in terms of administrative and extractive strength.¹⁵Close Administrative capacity refers to the ability of the state to gather, organize, and analyze relevant information that informs its decision making and its policies. A well-trained elite cadre of civil servants drawn from specialized academies (such as those in Japan trained at the Law Faculty of Tokyo University or in France at the École Nationale d’Administration) furthers the state’s interest more than inexperienced political cronies filling critical positions across the bureaucracy. Nation-states with a productive, transparent, and honest bureaucracy can better achieve effective policy. Finally, extractive capacity refers to the ability of the state to extract revenues—often through taxes—from the population to fund its programs, military expansion, and so forth. States with higher extractive capacity can leverage natural resource endowments, such as oil and mineral wealth, into long-term development funds, while nations with lower extractive capacity often struggle to ensure that the citizens—and not kleptocrats or warlords—benefit from such endowments. Norway and Nigeria both have extensive oil resources, but Norway has managed to secure its endowments to provide long-term subsidies to residents and extensive educational opportunities, while Nigeria has suffered from its “resource curse” and has struggled to keep from disintegrating due to civil war.

Development specialists, bureaucrats, and scholars have worked to assess levels of state capacity by considering provision of goods and services, use of repressive force, and the administration of democratic processes.¹⁶Close A number of indicators compiled by organizations such as the World Bank and Transparency International provide quantitative ways of classifying the capacity of states along these lines. Further research has argued that states with high levels of democracy and high-quality bureaucracies have higher GDP and better health and economic outcomes for their citizens, while those without these characteristics have lower GDP and worse outcomes.

India and Japan have relatively open input structures, in that citizens have a number of avenues through which their voices can be heard. These include not only institutionalized channels such as responsive political parties and public hearings, but also informal channels such as protests, lawsuits, riots, and hunger strikes. In contrast, Haiti and China allow fewer avenues for citizen voices to be heard. Citizens in Haiti find it difficult to access their very weak state, while China has deliberately repressed dissent and attempts at broader consensual decision making. In China, for example, the state regularly activates armies of state-sponsored internet users who, when contentious political issues arise, write dozens if not hundreds of posts on positive, irrelevant subjects on social media sites such as WeChat and Weibo.¹⁷Close Rather than shutting down dissent, the state seeks to distract those who would otherwise challenge state policy or foment opposition to its plans. China and Japan, though, both have far higher capacities than Haiti and India, which are hamstrung in their ability to gather information, collect revenue, and enforce state mandates.

Previous chapters, especially 4 and 5, have provided details about of Japanese prefectural and central government responses during and after the 3/11 triple disasters. I now describe three disasters that occurred in China, India, and Haiti in the decade preceding 3/11, compare them with the Tōhoku disaster, and investigate how the intersection of capacity and input structure affected each country’s response.

On May 12, 2008, at 2:28 p.m., a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Sichuan Province in western China. The impact of this disaster on China was a function of its governance systems. China has a Polity IV Democracy Score of −10; that is, experts believe that China has the same quality of governance as Bahrain and North Korea, countries known for poor records on human rights and little space for civil society organizations. In terms of its citizen safety nets, China spends around 14% of its GDP on social protections, the highest percentage among the three countries in these case studies.

The quake, known as the Great Sichuan or Wenchuan Earthquake, took place about 50 miles (80 km) west of the provincial capital of Chengdu, with the epicenter in Yingxiu Township in Wenchuan County of Sichuan Province. Roughly 88,000 people died—among them thousands of children—when numerous public buildings, including schools and hospitals, collapsed.¹⁸Close Nearly 8 million homes also collapsed, and more than 24 million were damaged. Businesses and factories across the region were destroyed. Estimates show that some 115 million people were affected by the disaster, with direct economic costs around $123 billion.¹⁹Close Approximately 370,000 people were injured and 5 million left homeless; the affected area covered more than 38,000 square miles (98,400 km²). Some 18,600 miles (30,000 km) of water pipes and other infrastructure were destroyed. Later, cascading failures complicated the recovery process as floodwaters spilled out of new lakes formed by local mudslides. China formally requested assistance from the international community and received more than $500 million in aid, along with loans from international organizations such as the World Bank.²⁰Close

China’s top-down, authoritarian structure brought rapid, but often controversial, responses to the disaster. China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development ordered 1 million temporary residences to be completed within three months. These camps housed internally displaced people until the government arranged new, permanent housing for them, a process it expected to take two to three years. For many citizens, this meant relocation to new cities, as the government labeled certain earthquake-hit areas as “relic parks” that were designated as areas only for tourists to visit, not for living.²¹Close Several disaster-affected towns were informed that they would promote the culture of a local indigenous group, the Qiang, for tourists.²²Close In others, such as Yingxiu, residents were told that they would have a new town where “every household has a shop, and everyone can work in tourism.”²³Close Over time, though, tourism to these disaster-affected areas has waned, making livelihoods challenging.

In November 2008, the central government announced that it would spend more than $150 billion to rebuild local homes and economies. It announced a three-year target for the completion of permanent housing for all families that lost residences to the earthquake, much of it far from their original homes. Some entire villages were moved up to 35 km (21 miles) away from their initial locations to less vulnerable sites. To assist the reconstruction, the government provided each household with some RMB 20,000 (roughly $2,800).²⁴Close

The strong capacity of the Chinese government allowed it to quickly direct necessary resources to the rebuilding process after the crisis. Whereas the Chinese government set out new legislation and mobilized economic and administrative resources within a month of the earthquake, it took Japan more than a year to bring the Reconstruction Agency on line, as we saw in the previous chapter.²⁵Close Yet a lack of regulation of pre-quake construction projects multiplied the effects of the Sichuan quake. Parents protested the low-quality construction of schools that had resulted in the deaths of many of their children. During the quake, some 12,000 schools in Sichuan and 6,500 in Gansu were destroyed.²⁶Close More than 1,000 of the Beichuan High School’s 2,790 students passed away during the quake.²⁷Close Locals called the school buildings “tofu dregs” or “tofu skins” due to their weakness. Following the collapse of the schools, “grieving parents accused local officials of corruption and cutting corners, setting off a storm of criticism of the government.”²⁸Close Several reports pointed out that schools in the region that had been funded by donations from Hong Kong—and whose construction had evidently been of a higher quality—did not collapse during the subsequent 2013 earthquake, which struck the same area.²⁹Close

After the Sichuan earthquake, Chinese state security forces suppressed protests against school collapse and construction corruption, often detaining or arresting those local parents or activists who spoke to the media on the issue. The exact number of children killed in the 2008 earthquake is not known; some have estimated that as many as 10,000 may have perished in their schools due to shoddy engineering and lack of effective regulation of construction. Within two months of the quake, some reported that local governments offered bereaved parents up to $9,000 on condition that they not raise their voices in protest. Volunteers and concerned outsiders could donate money and provide physical assistance, but pressure from the state kept them, too, from openly discussing issues like the collapse of schools.³⁰Close Chinese authorities blocked attempts some 10 years later to hold a memorial service for the victims.³¹Close Artists such as Ai Weiwei took up the cause through their work, creating art that drew attention to the school collapses and the government’s silence on the issue.³²Close

Despite attempts from activists to raise the issue of building regulations in place before the quake, Chinese state authorities influenced media coverage of the disaster and the recovery process. China regularly ranks at the bottom of the world in terms of media openness, as it uses coercion and co-optation to guide its domestic media to produce positive views of the government. One comparative study of US and Chinese newspaper coverage of disasters showed the very different frames and approaches used by newspapers. In China, “the media played the role of a ‘guard dog’ for the Party, upholding the government and the dominant ideology.”³³Close Rather than pushing Chinese authorities to alter future responses to disasters or chastising them for regulatory failures, the Chinese media supported their decisions and lashed out at those who criticized the Communist Party. They argued, for example, that the reconstruction was a “miracle” that showed how “hard work for two to three years can leap across twenty years of monumental change.”³⁴Close This contrasted with the coverage of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina by US newspapers, which used a variety of frames, including human mortality and damage, in their approach. Scholars showed that either direct government control over the media or the media’s own concern about state intervention drove coverage by Chinese newspapers, which took seriously the constitutional claim that Chinese citizens must defend “the security, honor, and interests of the motherland.”³⁵Close No such norms or restrictions govern the press in the United States, where news coverage of past disaster responses—such as for Hurricane Katrina—criticized the government directly and suggested alternative ways of responding to future disasters. Following the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2011 triple disasters, Japanese media outlets—often known for their weak watchdog role—criticized decisions made by the central government.

China’s nondemocratic system and culture of corruption have made it harder for civil society to create and enforce building codes that could save lives during disasters. Parents could not push local governments and politicians to check on the structural integrity of school buildings, and the media did not support protests against what many saw as corruption in the state and in the construction industry. Further, while volunteers and unregistered civil society organizations stepped up to assist after the earthquake, there was no mechanism in place to integrate them into the rescue, response, and recovery processes. Finally, as one group of researchers points out, “the top-down institutional framework has limited the autonomy of township governments from ensuring disaster related policy to be executed effectively.”³⁶Close As in Japan, where localities cannot pursue their own plans and visions for either mitigation or recovery, disaster-affected communities in China lack effective and satisfactory rebuilding processes.

Whereas China has strong state capacity but poor governance, India faces a different set of challenges when it meets crisis.

On the morning of January 26, 2001, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck India some 19 km (12 miles) northeast of Bhuj, in the state of Gujarat in the northwestern part of India. What governance systems were in place to handle the event? India has held steady in terms of spending on citizen safety nets, putting about 11% of its GDP into such expenditures (coming in third behind Japan and China), and it is a highly ranked democracy, earning a Polity IV Democracy Score of 9. After Japan, it is the highest-scoring democracy in our sample, far above China and Haiti.

In the 2001 earthquake, some 20,000 people died and 170,000 were injured. Almost 600,000 homes were destroyed by the quake, leaving more than 1.7 million residents homeless across the area. Estimates of the cost of the damage ranged as high as $5 billion. It remains the deadliest earthquake in India to date. The government immediately activated the National Disaster Management Control Room and sent in army troops to assist with the search-and-rescue efforts; within days, more than 25,000 rescue teams and personnel were deployed to the area. But due to damage to roads and other transportation infrastructure, many teams could not reach survivors in remote village areas. As the Indian government was still handling the lasting effects of floods in 1999, it sought assistance from the international donor community and organizations such as the Asian Development Bank.³⁷Close

Along with the official response from the Indian government, private aid organizations and NGOs sought to assist the survivors with medical assistance, housing construction, and food and water. Some 14 NGOs worked together under a grouping known as Kutch Navnirman Abhiyan. The government of Gujarat set up the Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority to manage the recovery process and soon planned $1 billion in reconstruction projects.³⁸Close Some observers labeled the authority’s approach “systematic and scientific” because it used strategies such as public-private partnerships to create highquality infrastructure.³⁹Close Rather than relying solely on public funds, the new approach brought in investment from the private sector. Indian government officials argued that the quake had changed the way future disasters will be handled. In a retrospective conference paper, one Indian civil servant argued that “the Gujarat earthquake resulted in a paradigm shift in the policy of the Government from relief and humanitarian assistance oriented post-disaster intervention to a proactive prevention, mitigation and pre-disaster preparedness.”⁴⁰Close

Despite such praise for the Gujarat-focused policies and hope for future responses, scholars underscored that the recovery process was not as participatory as it could have been, and that a number of obstacles undermined the process, including the government’s excessive bureaucracy, an underdeveloped disaster response policy, and irrelevant relief provision.⁴¹Close Other experts showed that many of the recovery plans put in place in areas such as housing ignored local citizen input and neglected to include bottom-up participation.⁴²Close Some observers argued that the state focused its aid delivery and assistance on rural areas such as Bachau, Rapar, and Anjar, overlooking the needs of middle-class residents in more urban areas. Others illuminated the weak regulation of construction codes in the area; a few were hopeful that local authorities could tighten enforcement. Still others pointed out that while there is no national law enforcing building codes, individual cities have enacted such laws.⁴³Close

The lack of financial and, in some cases, administrative and technical capacity weakened the Indian government’s response to the disaster. However, its open input structure allowed the participation of NGOs, and decision makers at least claimed that they hoped to incorporate bottom-up participation into the recovery process. Civil society organizations and the private sector played key roles in the process. In these ways, India was far ahead of Haiti when that nation faced an earthquake.

On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck some 25 km (16 miles) from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Haiti typically spends around 8% of its GDP on its citizen safety nets (with a low of 6% and a high of 9%, the smallest expenditure in our sample), and its Polity IV Democracy Score has whiplashed between a −10 (completely autocratic) until the late 1980s and up to 5 in 2010, when the earthquake arrived (political scientists would label it an anocracy, a country neither fully autocratic nor democratic). Such rankings place it as more democratic than China, but less democratic than India and Japan.

The 2010 quake killed at least 220,000 people and injured 300,000, causing the collapse of 250,000 homes and some 30,000 office and factory buildings. The lack of strong building codes and government capacity to enforce them meant that many concrete structures were vulnerable to seismic shocks. More than a million people across Haiti were left homeless. Critical government infrastructure was destroyed, including the Presidential Palace, the National Assembly, and the headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission, and many of the civil servants and specialists at these agencies perished. One-quarter of the civil servants employed by the Haitian government were killed. Additionally, transportation, communication, and other infrastructure networks were destroyed by the quake.

Because of Haiti’s status as a failed state and the fact that it “has endured political instability, chronic challenges in governance and the highest levels of poverty in the Western Hemisphere,”⁴⁴Close many residents of the nation suffered from extreme vulnerability well before the earthquake. The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) had been established in 2004 as a caretaker authority, assisting the government with issues such as security, elections, and human rights protection. MINUSTAH itself lost a number of its personnel in the quake, with at least 36 dead and more than 300 missing or unaccounted for.⁴⁵Close WHO reports stated that roughly half of Haitians lacked access to clean drinking water, and a similar percentage lacked access to health care, before the quake. Because of inadequate space, malnutrition, and overcrowding, sanitation and vector-borne diseases were serious challenges for responders to the disaster.⁴⁶Close The nation also suffered from tremendous underemployment (roughly three-quarters of the population lived on $2 a day or less) and widespread slum conditions.

Following the collapse of many structures and the damage done to those remaining, some 1.5 million people moved into overcrowded, unsanitary temporary camps. Because of difficulties in distributing sufficient food to the huge number of survivors, violence and looting broke out a number of times. When aid workers went to distribute food in the camps, they often required military escorts due to concerns over security.⁴⁷Close Further, cholera and other infectious diseases brought by the aid workers themselves claimed the lives of close to 6,000 and sickened more than 200,000 well after the earthquake. Later studies showed that Nepalese UN workers had introduced cholera to Haiti when they camped upstream from water sources, despite initial attempts to cover up its origin. Three years after the earthquake, despite more than $7.5 billion in aid, 500 camps remained in place, providing shelter to 360,000 displaced Haitians.

When donors sought to assist the state in rebuilding, they often had to work around the weak and volatile national government.⁴⁸Close Few ministries had sufficient funds, organization, or personnel to carry out their administrative responsibilities. According to one report, “a governance review of the health sector carried out by the Ministry of Health in 2007 shows that leadership and regulatory functions in Haiti were ‘weak or very weak’ at the central, departmental, and periphery levels.”⁴⁹Close Overall, Haiti’s government had a very low capacity before the earthquake, and the disaster reduced that capacity even more. Further, with a caretaker authority in place, few financial resources, and a “brain drain” of talented Haitians abroad to countries such as the United States and Canada, the country had a structure that was relatively closed to input from average citizens. In Haiti, the combination of a lack of government capacity and a lack of civil society input created an environment in which the earthquake, and then the consequences of a pandemic, were devastating.

The four nations in our sample—India, Haiti, China, and Japan—have all suffered earthquakes over the past two decades, but the impact of those disasters has been a function of the state, not of the magnitude of the quake. Table 6.1 summarizes the four earthquakes used here as case studies, in order from weakest to strongest. It is worth remembering that the magnitude scale is logarithmic, so that a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is 10 times greater than a magnitude 8.0 earthquake and

100 times greater than a magnitude 7.0 one. Japan’s 3/11 earthquake, 100 times more powerful than those in Haiti and India, killed roughly the same number of residents (as in India) or far fewer (than in Haiti).

This chapter has used brief case studies of disasters over the last 20 years to illustrate the interaction between governance, survival, and recovery. Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that poorly responsive governments, failed states, and social and infrastructure vulnerabilities multiplied the impact of a disaster. Weak political institutions in nations such as Haiti and India meant that decision makers were often unable to create or enforce building codes, so that even relatively weak seismic events created large numbers of casualties. Chinese local residents lacked the political voice to force changes in shoddy construction of schools. The Chinese government controlled the media and prevented open discussion of the conditions that led to thousands of student deaths. In contrast, Japanese authorities had long ago upgraded building standards so that almost no buildings collapsed, even in the areas closest to the epicenter of the quake. Around the world, strong building codes, rule of law, and state legitimacy have proved critical in effective and rapid rebuilds.⁵⁰Close

Even though the Haiti earthquake was far less powerful than its counterparts in China and Japan, it claimed far more lives because of weak building regulation. Then the conditions of poverty and lack of access to medical care meant that a disease brought in by those sent to assist with the quake ended up spreading and killing thousands. Similarly, more people died in the relatively weak Gujarat quake than in Japan’s earthquake and tsunami combined. China, despite its financial and coercive capacity, had not invested sufficiently in building codes pre-disaster, and therefore the lives of many children and other residents were lost. Broadly speaking, countries with low government capacity and little bottom-up input had lower regulatory standards for built structures, which then collapsed quickly, raising the casualty count and creating tremendous suffering.

More responsive governments invested in early warning systems and raised engineering standards to meet international expectations. Japanese authorities had tsunami warning measures in place and had made significant investments in tsunami and earthquake countermeasures, including enforced building codes, tsunami shelters, evacuation drills, seawalls, and disaster response plans. Despite failures in its physical infrastructure, Japan’s social infrastructure, education, and government capacity helped reduce the overall death toll from the 3/11 disaster. Poorer countries are unable to invest in risk reduction measures to this degree and therefore faced significantly more damage from disasters of the same size.

Japan and India had the most open input structures of the four countries in our case studies, meaning that post-disaster, authorities at least recognized the need to demonstrate that they listened closely to the demands of the public. Following the meltdowns at the three Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors, regulators moved to separate the overseers of the atomic energy industry from the organizations responsible for promoting it over the last half of the twentieth century (see chap. 5). Local citizens had the latitude and lack of censorship to collect, publish, and analyze their own data on radiation exposure levels through NGOs such as Safecast, despite grumblings from the central government. Indian authorities spoke openly of the need to incorporate the desires of local citizens and to seek to keep their needs in mind when building Gujarat back. In contrast, the Chinese government suppressed and then co-opted those who criticized the school collapses as a function of bribery or incompetence. Only outsiders and artists could criticize the state and attempt to raise the issues of corruption and lack of regulation. The Haitian government had little need to respond at all to citizen demands because most citizens felt disconnected from their state and uninterested in engaging it through protest or collaboration.

Earlier chapters that focused on resilience to disaster at the communal level demonstrated the role of local-level societal characteristics—such as social capital and social networks—in helping affected areas bounce back from adversity. Strong social bonds provide assistance during and after disaster through several mechanisms: strengthening survivors’ voices, increasing their capacity for collective action, limiting out-migration, and creating networks of mutual aid.⁵¹Close In the same way that at the community level, social characteristics matter for disaster resilience and recovery, on the national level, relationships between the state and society strongly predict the effectiveness of recovery efforts along with likely mortality from disasters.

A combination of low government capacity and lack of access points for citizens created a situation in which Haitians were incredibly vulnerable to the 2010 earthquake. Japan’s strong rule of law, high government capacity, and democratic governance allowed for an effective response to the triple disasters along with movement toward reform of poorly performing institutions (such as governance of the nuclear industry). Much of the disaster response industry is a reactive one, driven by the most recent disaster or crisis abroad. But these results indicate the need to create transparent governance, trust between citizen and state, and state legitimacy in nations across the world. It is precisely the weakest states in which citizens feel the most distance from their decision makers, and it is in these countries that outside agencies—whether state organizations such as the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), or the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or nonstate actors such as Amnesty International, MercyCorps, Transparency International, and WorldVision—should push the hardest to improve governance.

The increasing numbers of disasters worldwide and the rising economic costs of these disasters should focus our attention on improving the ways in which states listen to and interact with their citizens. Increasing state legitimacy and capacity will improve disaster responses and survival around the world. Having covered the 3/11 disasters at the individual, city, prefectural, national, and international levels, I now turn to policy suggestions and concrete recommendations for residents, NGOs, and decision makers.