Rebuilding the Foundations: Local Governance and Democratic Citizenship in Post-Earthquake Nepal

Disasters are often seen as something extraordinary—an ‘act of God.’ However, disaster researchers have highlighted the human dimensions of disaster management, including variation in social, political, and economic factors that affect how hazards like earthquakes and rains are experienced by people and communities. This project advances this research by centering the political economy of disaster management, and particularly the local political economy of post-disaster reconstruction, to understand the process of reconstruction as an interaction of demand-side factors, including citizen attribution of responsibility and trust, and supply-side factors, including histories of local institutions, resources, and governing elite. The project’s proposed theoretical framework enables the further theorization of variation in subnational disaster management using insights from public goods and service provisioning like roads, schools, and water. For the main empirical contributions of this project, I focus on three in-depth, subnational case studies in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal—the urban centers of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur—after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake using novel data from over 120 in-depth interviews, a survey and survey experiment (n = 1800), observation, and archival work. I develop and test the project’s central theoretical argument, namely that post-disaster reconstruction is dependent on pre-disaster local governance structures and that the process occurs in an acute market of labor, materials, and ideas. Whether the reconstruction process is a directed, centrally-led endeavor or a variegated, neighborhood-level process depends on the locality’s governance structure and extant resources–both material and nonmaterial–from which the community draws. I explore this argument both at the individual level—through variation in citizen expectations of the state towards reconstruction—and at the level of the urban municipality. In essence, this theory is a theory of variation in local post-disaster resilience. Yet, resilience here is defined not in a binary success or lack of success, but rather as a procedural concept whereby reconstruction processes can vary based on who rebuilds, what is rebuilt, and how structures are rebuilt. The implications of this theory and the larger framework of disaster management and reconstruction as a public good or service extend beyond environmental policy narrowly understood. Processes of preparation for and reconstruction after natural hazards are a part of larger policy feedback loops in the sense that residents conceptualize disaster management and reconstruction as a public good or service that is the responsibility of the state. This means that citizens have expectations of the state vis-a-vis disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction, and that their relationship to the state can affect and be affected by the implementation of their locality’s disaster policies and reconstruction processes. Understanding variation in local processes of disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction is thus important in itself as well as critical for understanding the trajectory of state-society relationships, active citizenship, and local governance in hazard-prone settings across the globe.