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Ostromian Lessons For Post-disaster Resilience: Evidence from the 2015 earthquake in Nepal
Get PDFThe dissertation is organized in six chapters. The first chapter provides a synopsis of the four research articles that are comprised in this manuscript. It outlines the goals of each article and connects them to specific Ostromian insights to shed light on the empirical findings. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 are based on a field study that I conducted in Sindhupalchowk, Nepal following the devastating earthquake in 2015. Chapter 4 uses case studies from Chicago, New Orleans, Nepal, and Indonesia. The final chapter summarizes major lessons from the four papers.
The second chapter investigates household-level coping responses to the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal and their role in post-disaster recovery. I measure post-disaster recovery using composite resilience-indices that capture both economic and psychosocial aspects of post-disaster recovery. Because household responses are potentially endogenous, I use a full-information multi-equation regression framework that allows for contemporaneous correlation across equations to account for the processes that determine households’ choices. I find strong evidence to suggest that increasing financial access and labor adjustment choices has positive and significant impact on post-disaster economic resilience. On the other hand, while the adoption of financial coping strategies enhances psychosocial resilience, I find that labor adjustment choices can disturb family and social dynamics, thereby negatively impacting psychosocial resilience. My secondary findings indicate that government assistance can have unintended detrimental impacts on economic resilience, hinting at the subpar quality of political institutions in Nepal. These results underscore the importance of mobilizing and expanding market and non-market alternatives in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction efforts.
The third chapter delves into post-disaster collective action. First-generation theories of collective action suggest that self-utility maximizing individuals in a setting characterized by high degrees of non-excludability and non-rivalry prefer the dominant strategy to evade cooperative choices and instead opt to free-ride. However, an overwhelming number of successful and unsuccessful collective action efforts documented worldwide in the aftermath of natural disasters contradicts this notion. This paper argues that second-generation theories of collective action forwarded by Elinor Ostrom and others bridge this theoretical-empirical divide. I posit that a social norm-based model of human behavior, not confined within a purely atomistic, material payoff maximizing mindset, provides a more consistent analytical framework to explain post-disaster collective activities. Using primary data from Sindhupalchowk, Nepal, I empirically demonstrate that bonding social capital fosters mutual trust, which in turn creates a milieu conducive to collective action efforts. Besides this mediated effect, I find that both bonding and bridging/linking social capital also have direct effects on post-disaster collective action. This paper presents social capital as the key determinant of self-governance and resilience in post-disaster situations that require concerted efforts from citizens, the private sector, and public institutions towards overcoming the common challenges of rehabilitation and reconstruction.
The fourth chapter makes a case for the dynamic nature of post-disaster goods and services. A post-disaster situation can be characterized as one filled with turmoil of all scales. The standard approach to post-disaster policymaking and academic thinking, particularly concerning post-disaster foreign aid in developing countries, tends to lump all aspects of relief, reconstruction, rehabilitation, and recovery as a single mega-project, — one that can be efficiently operationalized only under a Gargantua central planning body that is able to control all aspects of post-disaster recovery. This paper refutes such convenient assumptions as myopic and inconsistent with reality. Using insights from Ostroms’ analyses of the nature of goods and public choice, I unpack the elements of post-disaster package and analyze how institutional changes following a disaster can lead to changes in the nature of each element. To that end, I present four cases from Chicago, New Orleans, Nepal, and Indonesia to discuss the dynamic nature of post-disaster goods and services and the shuffling of goods-classification based on their shifting natures. The goal of this exercise is to highlight the diversity, heterogeneity, and fluidity of goods and services that are needed in any post-disaster scenario. This approach to reconceptualizing post-disaster aid is particularly relevant in developing countries that have poor-quality public institutions and are often mired in political corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies.
The fifth chapter examines the role of social entrepreneurs in post-disaster contexts. I argue that social entrepreneurship has a distinct role to play within the non-profit or third-sector. That is, its role is in no way residual, accidental, or tertiary – that of a temporary filler until the private sector and public institutions step in. This is especially true in the context of a post-disaster scenario where both the private and public enterprises have confined roles to play in the provision of private or public goods. It is the sector that lies within this ‘third’ domain that can contribute towards civic engagement, maintain the social fabric, and promote solidarity. Moreover, in post-disaster scenarios where infrastructures and institutions facilitating operations of markets and functioning of public institutions are hindered, social entrepreneurs often engage in the provision of goods and services whose production and provision are typically done by the private and/or public sectors. Their role, however, transcends the mere provision of goods, – private or public – and includes the promotion of active citizenship through co-production processes. Using a quasi-experimental set up from the case of Dhurmus Suntali Foundation’s Namuna village project in Nepal following the 2015 earthquake, I empirically demonstrate this critical role of the third sector in post-disaster contexts. My findings show that social entrepreneurs’ involvement increases citizens’ participation in volunteering activities, community engagement, and post-disaster reconstruction efforts
Governing the global fisheries commons
Get PDFDespite significant advances in understanding the biophysical and institutional causes of overfishing, we have yet to make progress in addressing the depletion of our global fisheries stock. Investigations of potential solutions tend to be too broad (mischaracterizing global fisheries as a singular commons problem to be addressed at the supranational level) or too narrow (focusing on improving management of small fisheries at the micro level). This article attempts to bridge the gap between our scientific understanding of our collective dilemmas and their pragmatic solutions. Building on insights from Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, we frame the depletion of global fisheries as a nested set of diverse and interconnected collective action problems organized at different horizontal and vertical levels, where decisions and actions of one jurisdictional unit reinforce and amplify problems (and solutions) for other units. We examine features of the global fisheries system, such as nonstationarity, nestedness, and prohibitive transaction costs. Then, we explore some potential solutions. The success of our conservation goals depends on our ability to craft institutional rules at the lower levels that are adaptive to local conditions, address incentive misalignment issues, and allow for the transfer of positive externalities to adjacent and higher levels.Versión publicad
Natural Disasters, ex-post coping mechanisms, and post-disaster resilience: Evidence from 2015 earthquakes in Nepal
No full textComplex externalities: introduction to the special issue
Get PDFcollection of essays extends analytical bridges between public choice, property rights economics, and new institutional economics. The essays question many of our prevailing assumptions behind the standard conceptualization of externalities. They also offer pragmatic and theoretical alternatives and apply these insights to analyze radio spectrum, environmental pollution, intellectual property, and public health issues. These essays demonstrate the ongoing significance of public choice in addressing society’s most pressing challengesVersión publicad
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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