Exploring the Role of Community Collaborative Networks in Disaster Risk Management in Korea

Community collaboration is recognized as an effective means to address this obstacle by supporting sustainable disaster risk management. Despite the growing importance of collaboration in modern disaster management, literature has emphasized the significance of collaboration, without offering perspectives on which forms of collaboration may be more effective. Also, little attention has been paid to how collaborative activities, when aligned with the inherent characteristics of communities, can contribute to mitigating disaster impacts. This study aimed to fill those gaps related to community collaboration for disaster management. We explored the role of community collaborative networks, encompassing resource exchange and symbiotic collaborative networks, in disaster risk management. We employed a panel regression model to analyze the impact of community collaborative networks on disaster damage. We also examined the moderating effect of community collaboration on the relationships between community factors and disaster damage to assess how community collaboration enhances a community's strengths and mitigates its weaknesses. Our findings indicate that building active resource exchange networks and dense symbiotic collaborative networks with neighboring communities reduces the cost of disaster damage. Building symbiotic collaborative networks also enhances the communities' strength in mitigating disaster damages. However, population aging can be an obstacle to using symbiotic collaborative networks. Our findings highlight the importance of strategically applying more effective forms of collaboration, rather than engaging in collaboration for its own sake, for disaster risk management. It is also meaningful in that we reveal how collaboration can contribute to disaster damage mitigation by indirectly enhancing the inherent strengths of communities.