Abstract:
Accountability in the process of emergency management of natural disaster is essential to improve the efficiency and to maintain and enhance the integrity and legitimacy of governments. Building accountability analyzing model in reputation respective, based on the empirical analysis of the accountability events of natural disasters in China in the past 21 years, it is found that: the attention and controversy of the audience, intensity of accountability function for the account-holders, emergency stage of the incidents, the core competence reputation concerned and the rank of the account-givers had different level of positive impacts on the accountability results. Its characteristics include: individual accountability is primary and collective accountability is secondary; account-givers were the grass-roots and middle level, dwindling upwards, with lack of the top; the stage of tackling relief and reconstruction were more focused than on prevention and early warning; the competence of moral and procedural were emphasized while performance was underrated and technical ability was ignored. The internal logic is: the response to the public voice is highly valued, and reputation of moral competence of protecting the people’s life safety and procedural competence of complying with social systems and rules is given priority. Meanwhile, through the account-holders with different intensity of accountability function, the divide-and-conquer strategy is used, so that it fully stimulate mobilization of middle-ranking governments and execution of grass-roots governments to mitigate disaster, which is the main logical root of the advantages and disadvantages of China’s natural disaster emergency management. It is suggested that we should take the public interest as the criterion to judge accountability rightness, attach more importance to accountability on prevention and early warning, emphasis on accountability for technical capacity, improve and implement mechanism for accountability, supervision and correction, etc.