Recently, the research team led by SEU Associate Prof. Ye Maoxin from the Department of Sociology, School of Humanities, in collaboration with Prof. Daniel P. Aldrich from Northeastern University in the United States, has made significant progress in the study of global disaster governance law diffusion. The related findings were published in Social Forces, a leading international sociology journal, under the title “When resonance makes law: structural diffusion in global disaster-law adoption, 1960–2025.”
Comprehensive disaster laws, which integrate disaster prevention and mitigation, emergency response, recovery, and reconstruction into a unified national governance framework, constitute an important institutional foundation for enhancing national disaster risk management capacity. However, why do some high-risk countries remain slow to enact such legislation, while some low-risk countries adopt comprehensive disaster laws relatively earlier? Conventional explanations treat disaster legislation as an automatic response to disaster exposure, yet cross-national data show no stable correspondence between the timing of legislation and the severity of disasters. To address this puzzle, the research team proposes a “structural resonance” theory, positing that external regional normative pressure translates into substantive legislation only when it resonates structurally with domestic governance needs and administrative capacity. The team constructed the world’s first dataset on the timing of comprehensive disaster law adoption, covering 204 countries and territories over 65 years, and employed Cox proportional hazards models for event history analysis. The results show that recent disaster exposure is not a robust predictor of legislation—its effect diminishes once regional diffusion and domestic governance variables are accounted for—whereas the proportion of countries in the region that have already adopted such laws significantly accelerates the legislative process.
Further analysis by the research team reveals that the higher the degree of administrative decentralization in a country, the stronger the facilitative effect of regional diffusion on legislation. In governance systems with dispersed administrative hierarchies, comprehensive disaster laws serve an institutional integrating function by clarifying roles and responsibilities and coordinating cross-level actions—thus creating a strong structural resonance between external normative templates and domestic coordination needs. Meanwhile, countries with higher levels of government accountability are also more likely to legislate earlier, suggesting that administrative capacity is an important condition for translating external norms into enforceable legislation. This study demonstrates that the legalization of global disaster governance is not a simple functional response to disaster shocks, but rather a sociological process in which external normative pressures resonate with domestic governance structures—offering a novel theoretical perspective for understanding global policy diffusion and national institutional change.
SEU Associate Prof. Ye Maoxin from the Department of Sociology, School of Humanities, is the first and corresponding author of this paper, while Prof. Daniel P. Aldrich from the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University is a co-author, and Southeast University is the primary affiliation.
Paper’s link:https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soag109
Source: School of Humanities, SEU
Translated by: Melody Zhang
Edited by: Leah Li
