The role of community leadership in disaster recovery projects: Tsunami lessons from Japan

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Highlights

  • Community leaders practised ‘active leadership’ in the Nagasuka Beach Recovery Project.

  • Their ‘active leadership’ was key to managing multiple stakeholders.

  • Project management was adapted to the socio-cultural context of Minami-sanriku.

  • There was a clear link between active leadership and the success of the Recovery Project.

Abstract

While project management has been effectively applied to many fields and sectors, disaster management has yet to see its full benefits. This inductive study generates insights about the nature and role of ‘active leadership’ (LaBrosse, 2007) in the context of a community led recovery project in Minami-sanriku, Japan, an area affected by the 2011 tsunami. Community leaders displayed ‘active leadership’ evidenced in 1) the effective identification of project objectives and relevant stakeholders, 2) the efficient management of stakeholder engagement and 3) the robust understanding of the socio-cultural context in which the Nagasuka Beach Recovery Project took place. This multi-disciplinary and inductive study highlights the need to train project managers (be they community leaders or otherwise) in both technical and soft leadership skills: the former ensure that Project Management methodologies are clearly understood and applied; the latter facilitate the adaptation of these methodologies to the specific socio-cultural locales in which recovery projects take place.

Introduction

While the project management approach has been effectively applied to many fields and sectors, disaster management has yet to see its full benefits. This state of affairs is due to the fact that disaster recovery projects have unique features such as emergent strategies, uncertainty, time urgency, community vulnerability and stakeholder issues and, therefore, pose different challenges when compared to typical projects (Baroudi and Rapp, 2014, Crawford et al., 2012). Olshansky et al. (2012) argue that time compression makes disasters unique and distorts the disciplinary lenses that would work under normal circumstances. This requires a more contextualised application of project management methodologies and trans-disciplinary research rather than discipline bound studies. Our study draws on project management, disaster management and organisation theory to inductively develop insights grounded in empirical realities.

Although disaster management has been described by some commentators as a form of public project management (Moe and Pathranarakul, 2006), the application of project management to disaster projects remains limited to immediate, aid-type fast responses rather than to medium and longer term recovery projects. Our study documents the application of aspects of project management in a medium term recovery project, namely the Nagasuka Beach Recovery Project based in Minami-sanriku (an area in Japan that was hit and severely impacted by the 2011 tsunami). Our overall objective is to explore the meanings and working of ‘active leadership’ (a project management concept coined by LaBrosse in 2007) in this community-based recovery project and the extent to which it contributes to the success of the project.

We do so by asking two research questions:

  • Q1)

    How does ‘active leadership’ work in the context of Nagasuka Beach Recovery Project?

  • Q2)

    What is the relationship between ‘active leadership’ and the outcome of the project?

The research was carried out between November 2013 and November, 2015. Its focus was on the role played by the local community leaders (who became project leaders) in engaging, liaising and managing multiple stakeholders while accounting for the socio-cultural context in which the project took place. We are not the first researchers to argue that ‘active leadership’ is at the heart of effective stakeholder engagement and management in recovery projects (Baroudi and Rapp, 2014). We contribute to this body of literature by documenting how ‘active leadership’ was enacted by the Minami-sanriku community leaders managing the Nagasuka beach recovery project and how this process facilitated the success of the project.

The paper starts with a literature review of the main stakeholders involved in disaster recovery efforts and extant stakeholder issues identified by current research. It then reviews state of art research on the role of project management approaches in disaster recovery projects, highlighting a specific gap in the literature with regards to role of ‘active leadership’ in managing stakeholder engagement in community-based recovery projects. General and specific background information about the case study is then provided, along with a discussion of why the case was selected and how the data was collected and analysed. The main findings are outlined, followed by a discussion of the contribution made by study to bridging the fields of project management and disaster recovery, its limitations and future areas for research.

Section snippets

Stakeholders involved in disaster recovery

A great deal of research investigates the role of various stakeholders in disaster recovery such as business organisations, government, NGOs, volunteer groups, international agencies as well as the role of the disaster stricken community itself.

Business organisations are one of the most important stakeholders in the process of recovery. An important strand of the literature on disaster recovery focuses on the restoration and recovery of business organisations. Studies of reinstating order in

Background to the case study

On March 11, 2011, the largest ever earthquake and ensuing tsunami and nuclear crisis hit the North-eastern areas of Japan. The earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0 and the tsunami waves reached heights of up to 40.5 m. The large scale of this disaster (see Table 1) renders the recovery process very challenging, requiring the involvement of multiple stakeholders and a long term approach for its success.

In addition to economic and environmental impacts, the 2011 disaster has had a deep effect on the

Research methodology

A single qualitative case study focusing on the beach recovery project was selected in order to allow for an in-depth exploration of the relationship between ‘active leadership’ and the success of the project. Qualitative case studies are becoming more accepted in the field of operations and project management (Barratt et al., 2011). Yin (2014) defines the case study as a strategy of research that focuses on a contemporary phenomenon within its wider context and uses multiple methods and

Conclusions

As Johnson and Hayashi (2012) suggested, the complexities of disaster recovery projects cannot be captured by sitting within one discipline. Rather, multi-disciplinary approaches are needed, along with mixed research methodologies that give voice to multiple stakeholders while accounting for the institutional, cultural and social context in which recovery projects are managed. This study responds to this call by drawing on theoretical insights from project management, disaster management and

Conflict of interest

The authors report no relationships that could be construed as a conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

The study was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Grant No: AH/K006185/1 and by the Seinan Collaborative Research Foundation, Japan. We would like to thank the three reviewers, Dr. Paul Forrester and Dr. Stephen Linkman for their useful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

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