Examination of citizens’ trust for digital communication of local government: Focusing on urban resilience and harmonised city development.

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the relationships and to develop an analytical model with measurements of citizens' trust towards local government’s digital communication via city resilience and city design. Japan is prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, and local governments are required to prioritise disaster prevention and city resilience, and to design harmonized city development planning with a balance between nature and human. Based on the benefit of recent ICT advancement, each local government is required to implement a digital communication scheme with citizens and establish a closer communication to share critical information and to dissemination of policy aim to call for support from citizens in engaging in covalue creation of communities. In light of this situation, this study uses a citizen survey dataset to identify the key themes of disaster resilient urban design that citizens value as antecedents to their satisfaction with government digital communication in the context of city resilience and harmonized development, and to examine how these key elements influence their trust of local government digital communication. The study applied quantitative methods to a dataset of citizen surveys in a medium-sized Japanese city to examine the relationship between three hypothetical antecedents developed from the literature review and citizens' digital communication of local government. The three main policies proposed from the literature review are Support for community activities, City resilience, and Harmonised development between nature and human. Residents in the downtown area are more likely to trust the city administration's digital communication to develop in harmony with the environment, rather than the city resilience element, which includes flood prevention and disaster support. On the other hand, residents in the uptown area, which has never been affected by floods in the past, place more importance on city resilience which leads to their trust for local government's communication. This allows us to identify the issues that local governments, facing the challenge of disaster prevention and mitigation, should address as key themes in their digital communication with citizens.