Post-disaster Community Recovery and Community-Based Collaborative Action Research—A Case of Process Evaluation Method for Community Life Improvement

Innovation is not an undoubted factor to solve various social and economic hardships and lead us to a more prosperous society. In fact, the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred on 11 March 2011 and shocked both Japan and the world with its scale and seriousness of the adverse impacts on human communities and living environment. The number of natural and man-made disasters continues to rise and create hardships in different parts of the world. It does reflect growing concern over a healthy planet and well-being of people and the members of the United Nations adopted sustainable development goals (SDGs) as the overarching development goal for all in 2015. SDGs state clearly in SDG 11 that we have to find ways to realize sustainable development at cities and communities. Although SDGs become a set of common global development goals, it has never been an easy task to overcome such an adversity and find a way to restore and revitalize communities in any of the post-disaster period. The government assistance is necessary to rebuild basic infrastructure and social services for any community. However, it is not sufficient enough to provide assistance only from outside to recover and rebuild the damaged community. A critical challenge is whether a community building could be sustainable in the long run. The community’s recovery and reconstruction require local people’s voices, community’s future vision by identifying and using local assets and resources. For that end, stakeholders’ autonomous endogenous initiatives play a vital role. In this context, collaboration between stakeholders and experts is needed, and community-based collaborative action research has gradually received serious attention as a practical research method. In 2004, Chuetsu earthquake occurred and damaged communities in Niigata prefecture in Japan. In the process of a long-run recovery and revitalization of a small community in the area of the epicenter of the earthquake, a team of researchers started collaborative action research with the local residents by applying a process evaluation method for community life improvement. This chapter focuses on the issues of sustainable community development through an experiment of the process evaluation method as a community-based collaborative action research. We discuss effectiveness of community-based collaborative action research as co-creative method, which can promote public participation in scientific development and innovation.