Research On Local Government's Public Crisis Governance From The Perspective Of Social Capital

Facing the increasingly grim public crisis during China's transformation period, the local government should change its responding pattern form traditional single-main-body pattern to a multi-main-body network pattern. It is not only to reflect the value of the modern public governance, but also to cope with the normalized public crisis during the transformation period. At first, this essay puts forward an analyzing framework of public crisis governance based on social capital theory by defining the concept of public crisis governance and interpreting the social capital theory.Secondly, mainly taking the freezing rain and snow disaster in Hunan Province of 2008 for example, this essay points out the disadvantages of the current longitudinal, government dominating single-main-body pattern. These disadvantages includes: the lack of the governance patterns and over-reliance on central government; the lack of horizontal connections and the imbalance of the network pattern; the low density of the bottom level and the poor participation of the grass roots; the inadequate authority of the Emergency Management Committee of the local government; the"locked"resources dealing with the public crisis; local and departmental protectionism, and so on.Thirdly, the author explained the causes of the problems during the local government's public crisis governance from three different levels of social capital theory. At the macro level of social capital, the traditional idea of power centralization is the root cause of the government dominating single-main-body pattern; the traditional geo-based concept and the governmental departmentalism cause the local and departmental protectionism; the lack of laws and regulations leads to the practice that social participation in the public crisis governance has no necessary safeguards. At the organizational level of social capital, the hierarchized authoritative relationship in the organization cause the fact that the connections are mainly vertical instead of horizontal, resulting in an unbalanced governance network structure; since the development of the social organizations has been hampered, the channels for the public to participate in the public crisis governance have been limited. At the individual level of social capital, because of the public's lack of trust to the local government and the restrictions for the public to be a part of the governance network makes it more difficult for the grass-roots to participate in the public crisis governance.Finally, through all those analysis, this essay puts forward some ways of public crisis governance's transformation. The following principles should be abided: Encouraging broad participation, training in general trust and recognition as a whole and improve the system of norms; A multi-main-body governance network including Grass-roots self-government organizations, enterprises, hospitals, schools, non-governmental organizations, families, media should be established; By improving the mechanism of the local Emergency Management Committee, the local government's public crisis governance pattern will be optimized.