IDRiM Journal
Vol 4, No 2 (2014)
http://idrimjournal.com/index.php/idrim/issue/view/12

Decision-Making, Policy Choices and Community Rebuilding after the Tohoku Disaster
Junko Mochizuki
Abstract
The long-term reconstruction following the 2011 tsunami disaster has required extensive deliberation at all levels of government that is now redefining and redrawing the future of the region. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted with municipal government officials and community leaders in the cities of Miyako and Kesennuma in January 2013, this study identifies the ways in which local communities have defined, prioritized and adopted a set of objectives and measures for long-term reconstruction, and how these will likely to affect the disaster risk and community rebuilding in the coming years. Particular attention is paid to the debate surrounding tsunami defense measures, including the rebuilding of sea walls, the relocation of communities, and other land-use adjustments, and how multi-layered governance plays out in balancing the need for swift recovery, optimal resource allocation, and future disaster risk reduction. Since the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, the national recovery policy has stressed the need to build ‘tsunami-resilient’ communities, envisioning the construction of multi-buffer tsunami defense systems characterized by coastal land-use restrictions based on nationally determined guidelines of relatively frequent to extreme rare tsunamis. While this hands-on approach by the national government has contributed to streamlining the reconstruction processes, limited opportunities for citizen participation have contributed to tensions among stakeholders, calling into question the community ownership of decision-making following a disaster.

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Disaster Risk and Effect of Informal Insurance on Human Capital Formation in Rural Areas of Developing Countries
Shiyu ZHANG, Muneta YOKOMATSU
Abstract
”Disaster and poverty” has become one of the main topics of global development for decades. Nowadays, in the rural areas of many developing countries, farmers’ fate is still decided by natural conditions. They have little savings and little chance to finance from the banks. Obviously, they are extremely vulnerable to the natural disasters like droughts, floods, typhoons and earthquakes. Many methodologies dealing with poverties in developing countries have been investigated from a variety of aspects. However, few of these researches focus on human capital. Recognizing the importance of human capital in agricultural activity, this paper develops a methodology to analyze the human capital formation under disaster risk in rural areas of developing countries. Taking intergenerational externalities into consideration, this paper builds a three-period overlapping generations model. It is assumed that after the occurrence of a disaster, farmers are forced to leave rural areas if they cannot get enough food from their harvest to survive. In the rural areas where no insurance is provided by financial sector, farmers try to keep staying in their village in various ways of what we call informal insurance. In order to figure out the effect of these informal insurance mechanism on the formation of human capital as well as emigration from rural areas, Quasi-Credit contracts and saving of livestock are considered in the latter part of the paper. Findings in this paper show that farmers are exposed to the risk of emigration without informal insurance and the existence of a vicious circle between low human capital and little human capital investment is confirmed. Moreover, Quasi-Credit contract could prevent large-scale emigration but might bring down the incentive to invest in human capital at the same time. However, within a certain range, saving of livestock might be effective to reduce emigration and raise the human capital investment as well.