Research On The Post-Wenchuan Earthquake Community Development

Post-disaster reconstruction is a complex system process which involves rural and urban layout, economic development, order reconstruction and cultural heritage, and other aspects. In the many dimensions of it, the community development plays an important role in social support for individuals, families and even the long-term recovery. In the perspective of governance, this paper will define the post-disaster community development as a process of collective action which means the affected people get recovered by combining their own ability with other external support, and ultimately enhance their capacity to resist risks. The essence of this process lies in how to regulate the various activities of different subjects, so how to distinguish their roles and interactions will ?become the focus of this paper.The main points of this paper include: (1)?Post-disaster community development means that with the support and guidance of government, the affected people combine the self-help with external forces to help the communities return to normal life and get re-development opportunities. It has some features such as long-term nature, complexity, and systemic; (2)?Compared to physical space reconstruction, post-disaster community development will pay more attention to the psychological reconstruction, focusing on promoting the capacity of anti- vulnerability in the future. Therefore, it is important to stimulate the local people to obtain a greater impact on decision-making which maybe affect their lives; (3)? It is necessary to distinguish the different roles among those various objects. At present, the Government still undertakes most of the reconstruction task, and dominate the direction of community development, while the local affected people and other forces don't work effectively; (4) The performance and content of post-earthquake community development are affected by many factors, such as local technical, socio-economic, and administrative conditions and the impact of disaster damage, so the characteristics and constraints of reconstruction will be different.The community development after Wenchuan earthquake has shown that the way that respect the dominant position of the local people, and strengthen community-led community development is critical to achieve the governance transformation from "external blood transfusion" to "self-blood". To this end, it is necessary to build a combination of collaborative governance mechanism including "government assistance, social assistance and victims'self-help" to promote co-operation among the Government, the affected people and civil society. This will be a long-term process full of constant adaptation.