Study On Public Crisis Management And Social Participation

Since 1990's, our country began to face more and more public crisis. Occurrence of public crisis in high frequency has become an inevitable challenge to public management. As the representative of common rights, the government has to play a leading role in dealing with critical incident. As the types of the public critical incident become more and more diversified and the inducement of crisis becomes more and more complicated, it is far from enough to deal with public crisis with the efforts of government itself. Mobilizing the masses to deal with public crisis is the key factor to promote government's crisis management ability. Our country is in a vital stage in which economy and society are on transition. In the period of transition, social strength begins to awake, and the public are eager to take part in the process of public management. Although, our government has realized the importance of public crisis management, it still keeps the consciousness of the "all-round type" management, lacking of the realization of the effect of social participation in public crisis management. Therefore, how to mobilize the public to exert all their strength in public crisis management becomes a urgent problem needs to be resolved.The article is constructed by four sections: In the first section, some concepts related with public crisis management are defined. In the second part, "civil society theory" and "governance theory" are used to support the argument of social participation in public crisis management. Then the inevitability of social participation in public crisis management is illustrated, and effects of social participation are also described. After that, situations and problems of government and the public in public crisis management are explained by ways of individual case analyzing and general analyzing in the third section. In the last section, by ways of time series analysis, public crisis management process is divided into three stages: preventing stage, dealing stage and recovering stage. After summing up useful experience in some foreign countries and fully analyzing the situations in our country, some specific suggestions about how to promote government's public crisis management ability in the each stage have been described.