Reconstructing Communities: Participatory Recovery Planning In Post-Disaster Japan

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic, socio-historical study of public participation in post-disaster recovery planning in Japan from the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in Kobe through ongoing recovery activities in the tsunami-devastated areas of Tōhoku. It investigates how a "new breed of specialists" in participatory recovery planning (PRP), primarily from Kobe, co-constructed the field of PRP along with their own expertise, and scrutinizes what happens specifically when these experts work together with the local residents of the Sanriku coast, who apprehend the world from very different cultural, historical and epistemological perspectives. This work reveals PRP in Tōhoku as a process through which the "community" of experts and the "community" of locals strive to re-construct themselves and each other. Based on ethnographic data, this dissertation questions both the old "deficit model" of an ignorant and irrational public and the (recently in vogue) deficit model of "unreflexive" experts constitutionally blind to local context and the situated character of knowledge - at least with respect to a certain category of expert, epitomized by the PRP experts from Kobe. Drawing upon recent scholarship, the thesis argues that it is fruitful to dub this category engagement agents: technical experts who "orchestrate" participatory engagement exercises, integrate and contextualize diverse knowledges, and liaise with diverse stakeholders and key constituencies. Among the core practices of engagement agents is the praxis of trust-work, through which they construct and maintain their credibility as experts and their trustworthiness as moral agents, integrating their several roles. Putatively "non-expert" individuals without formal training may also pick up the know-how of a technical specialty and become recognized as authoritative "experts" while practicing the peculiar roles of engagement agents, while also retaining the social and epistemological advantages of "locals." "Expertise" is not solely about the production, use, or communication of "knowledge." Rather, there are as many ways of "being an expert" or "constructing expertise" as there are of situating practice, locating social identity, negotiating credibility, eliciting trust, engaging constituencies, or enacting reflexivity.