One of the key lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake is the importance of strengthening the disaster response capacity by activating a mutual-aid attitude among various actors, including residents, communities, and businesses. Given the limitations of public-aid that can be provided by the governments, residents and communities need to be prepared for the next big disaster by enhancing cooperation among them in their daily lives. This study aims to empirically analyze whether social capital before the disaster, as measured by the participation level in community activities, can promote the mutual-aid attitude (giving aid and receiving aid) after the disaster. Using a micro dataset from the local residents’ survey in the disaster affected area, a model for analysis—wherein the correlations of the giving aid function and the receiving aid function were taken into consideration—was developed. The result of the analysis indicates that mutual-aid attitude becomes significantly higher when participation in community activities in daily lives is more active, implying that social capital facilitates cooperation among residents and communities, and promotes recovery.

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The business sector is focusing on CSR and the number of the partnership between the business and NGOs has been increasing in Japan. However the NGO sector is much smaller than the Business and Public sectors in Japan. Recently enterprises have contributed to solving social problems, declaring CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), and the number of the instances in which enterprises work in partnership with NGOs to solve social problems has been increasing. The objective of this study is to classify the partnership of business and NGOs and discuss about its issues and future outlook. It was divided into three partnership types: Charity, Project Support, and Collaboration. In each type, partnership brings about some advantages to enterprises and NGOs and they complement each other’s insufficiencies. However, there are some problems or difficulties to be solved for constructing these partnerships. This study shows problems and advantages to partnerships between enterprises and NGOs, as well as future possibilities.

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