Japan's Environmental Politics and Governance

Book excerpt: Environmental issues stretch across scales of geographic space and require action at multiple levels of jurisdiction, including the individual level, community level, national level, and global level. Much of the scholarly work surrounding new approaches to environmental governance tends to overlook the role of sub-national governments, but this study examines the potential of sub-national participation to make policy choices which are congruent with global strategies and national mandates. This book investigates the emerging actors and new channels of Japan’s environmental governance which has been taking shape within an increasingly globalized international system. By analysing this important new phenomenon, it sheds light on the changing nature of Japan’s environmental policy and politics, and shows how the links between global strategies, national mandates and local action serve as an influential factor in Japan’s changing structures of environmental governance. Further, it demonstrates that decision-making competencies are shared between actors operating at different levels and in new spheres of authority, resulting from collaboration between state and non-state actors. It highlights a number of the problems, challenges, and critiques of the actors in environmental governance, as well as raising new empirical and theoretical puzzles for the future study of governance over environmental and global issues. Finally, it concludes that changes in the tiers and new spheres of authority are leading the nation towards an environmentally stable future positioned within socio-economic and political constraints. Demonstrating that bridging policy gaps between local action, national policy and global strategies is potentially a way of reinventing environmental policy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Environmental Studies, Environmental Politics and Japanese Politics.