While scholars in policy and planning have emphasized the theoretical significance of the civil society construct in the public sphere and its involvement in the policy decision-making process, rarely has attention been given to the dynamics of the action structure inside the civil society domain. It is thus critical to depict accurately the governing rules and the sources of agency—the active initiation of resilient behavior--from the perspective of civil society actors. This study pays particular attention to the application and execution of the social network methods to look into the relational nature of human behavior in activating collective capacity to adapt to change. I examine a self-initiating and self-evolving change process in civil society after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China. Using network data from 70 Sichuan-based earthquake recovery-oriented informal social groups and formal nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I investigated the network behavior among these civil society actors over three specified time periods: 1) before the 2008 Earthquake; 2) immediately and short-term after the Earthquake;, and 3) long-term (up to three years) recovery period. I utilized the SIENA program implemented in the R statistical system to investigate longitudinally: 1) Whether the institutional status in terms of actor registration had an effect on communication and collaboration behavior; 2) Whether there were structural tendencies that would affect specific formation patterns of network development in communication and collaboration; 3) Whether the types of recovery activities in which  actors engaged in had an effect on the structural dynamics of the communication and collaboration networks; 4) Whether there were tendencies for cross-mediation between communication and collaboration structures.

 The findings demonstrated the formation of a type of proactive coping style through which newly emerged group and organizational actors took the primary role in overcoming their differences in institutional status and in re-constructing a social structural environment that nurtured the long term social capacity in dealing with extreme distress or uncertainty. The inter-group autopoietic behavior self-generated a kind of change dynamics that prompted its own structural evolution, thus showing preliminary signs of endurance and transformation.

This study illuminates the significance of the cultural-cognitive aspect of institutional formation and sustainability in order to understand the emerging process of a self-generating social support system at the informal group and formal organizational level. The study also contributed to how the concept of power can be understood by way of examining the civil society construct in times of extreme uncertainty. The network analytic method implemented in this study identifies key behavioral factors that can facilitate the policy process opening up opportunities for citizen participation and enhancing the capabilities of civil society actors. This endeavor thus sheds light to the development of policy tools to evaluate the action and behavioral outcomes of the stakeholders in the policy system dynamic, thus enhance the capacity of public managers and planners to be more responsive to change as well as the social and political contexts within which changes are often embedded.