Wei Fan, Zhang Xiao Yang, Li Yu Xuan
The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has incorporated "enhancing the capacity for disaster prevention, mitigation, and relief, as well as the handling of urgent, difficult, and dangerous public emergencies" into the core deployment of the overall national security system, clarifying that emergency management effectiveness is a key support for advancing the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity. On July 21, 2012, Beijing encountered the most severe extraordinary rainstorm since complete meteorological records began in 1951. The average rainfall across the city was 170 millimeters, with the maximum rainfall at Hebei Town in Fangshan District reaching 460 millimeters (later revised to 541 millimeters), approaching a once-in-500-years extreme value. The heavy rainfall lasted nearly 16 hours, causing 79 deaths and affecting 1.9 million people, exposing multiple practical dilemmas in local government emergency management, including lagging early warning response, poor inter-departmental coordination, insufficient grassroots response capacity, and weak infrastructure resilience, while also providing a typical sample for research on emergency governance in mega-cities. This study takes Beijing's "7·21" extraordinary rainstorm disaster as the core case, constructing a mixed research framework of "case thick description—comparative analysis—mechanism extraction": In the case study, our group first adopts the process tracing method to restore the full-cycle interaction process of disaster evolution and government response, identifying key decision nodes and response shortcomings. At the same time, we employ the embedded comparison method to compare the strategic differences and effectiveness gaps in responding to extreme rainfall among Beijing, Tianjin, and Shijiazhuang, comprehensively studying the common experiences and individual problems of regional collaborative governance. In addition to the above research, we combine social network analysis to analyze the structural characteristics of cross-departmental collaboration, use fsQCA (fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis) to identify multiple concurrent causal paths affecting emergency effectiveness, and employ LDA topic modeling to mine the core topic distribution of emergency management policy texts, forming an empirical support with complementary multiple methods. The study systematically identifies four core dilemmas currently facing local government emergency management effectiveness: At the technology embedding level, there are problems of data barriers and insufficient adaptability of smart tools; at the government-enterprise collaboration level, there are problems of blurred responsibility boundaries and poor resource linkage; at the spatial equilibrium level, there are imbalances in urban-rural and regional emergency resource allocation; and at the institutional fragmentation level, there are problems of overlapping cross-departmental authority and absent process connectivity. On this basis, we construct a three-dimensional interactive analysis model of "Concept—System—Capacity," revealing the internal mechanism of effectiveness generation: Modernization of concept is the driving force for effectiveness enhancement, promoting the transformation of emergency management from passive response to proactive prevention; system reshaping is the carrier support, breaking the fragmented governance pattern through authority restructuring, process optimization, and institutional integration; capacity leap is the direct manifestation, covering the full-chain capabilities of risk assessment, resource scheduling, on-site response, and recovery and reconstruction. The three form a synergistic evolution dynamic closed loop of "concept guiding system iteration—system supporting capacity enhancement—capacity feedback optimizing concept." Based on the above conclusions, the study proposes optimization paths from four dimensions: In the technology empowerment dimension, promoting the construction of smart emergency platforms, breaking through data barriers to achieve precise risk assessment; in the government-enterprise collaboration dimension, constructing a linkage mechanism of shared responsibility and complementary resources to activate the participation effectiveness of social forces; in the resilience construction dimension, strengthening the resilience of infrastructure and the emergency response capacity of grassroots communities to narrow the spatial governance gap; and in the holistic governance dimension, improving cross-departmental and cross-regional collaborative systems to solve the problem of fragmented governance. At the same time, we explore the development of an emergency management effectiveness assessment tool based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), providing operable theoretical support and decision-making references for grassroots government emergency governance capacity diagnosis and continuous improvement.
Emergency Management Effectiveness; Local Government; 7·21 Rainstorm Disaster; Process Tracing; Three-Dimensional Interaction Model