Abstract ID: 3.13248 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA

Rural communities frequently bear the brunt of natural disasters due to limited infrastructure and scarce economic resources—a vulnerability that sharply contrasts with urban areas where economic capital predominates. Recent disaster events have exposed the shortcomings of conventional top-down risk management systems in these settings. To address this gap, this study develops and empirically tests a novel measurement scale designed to quantify how social capital—encompassing personal networks, trust, and reciprocity—bolsters rural disaster resilience across three critical phases: pre-disaster preparedness, in-disaster response, and post-disaster recovery. Drawing on survey data from 349 households in six debris-flow–prone villages of Wenchuan County, China, and employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), our findings indicate that personal networks (standardized coefficient = 0.279), trust (0.165), and reciprocity (0.124) each exert a significant positive effect on overall resilience (all p < 0.05). Moreover, the village cadre system emerges as a crucial institutional node, complementing top-down approaches by facilitating swift communication and coordinated resource allocation. These results advance our theoretical understanding of social capital’s role in rural disaster governance and offer practical insights for developing community-focused, policy-relevant strategies in high-risk rural areas.