The transformation of Japan’s environmental policy

In the 1960s, advanced economies in major countries, such as the United States, West Germany, and Japan, ushered in the era of national environmental policy-making. By the early 1970s, Japan had some of the world’s strongest environmental regulations, yet was also known for its strong commitment to economic development and business interests. However, by 1990, Japan was no longer a clear leader.3 According to the ENVIPOLCON (Environmental governance in Europe: the impact of international institutions and trade on policy convergence) database, including 40 environmental policy issues (air, water, waste, noise, energy and climate, nature protection, and others) in 21 European countries, the United States (US), Mexico, and Japan from 1970,4 Japan was ahead of most countries in the early years (fifth place in 1970) in terms of the presenceof-policy of each environmental issue area but failed to retain this high position (sixteenth place in 1990). The strictness of Japan’s environmental polices also toppled from a high ranking in 1970 to a very low position in 1990, while all the other countries became stricter from 1970 to 1990 regarding almost all environmental policies.5 Why was Japan able to get environmental issues on the agenda and take legislative action only for a short period of time in the early years? Many scholars argue that the severity of industrial pollution made it impossible to ignore and thus concerns regarding this prevailed over pro-development policies in electoral processes.6 Additionally, some focus on actors, emphasizing Japan’s antiindustrial pollution movements as an ultimate factor.7 The policy shift was ascribed to political pressures that these movements generated as both the electoral threat to the ruling party and the productivity threat to big business grew rapidly.8 Opposition-controlled localities are also considered to be a continuing source of pressure on the national government.9 Opposition parties in control of local governments were quick to adopt stricter pollution prevention measures than those imposed at the national level. But their labor constituency was reluctant to endorse high pollution-related expenses10 and, once the national ruling party incorporated some of the opposition’s more popular measures into its platform, the momentum from local activism waned in the mid-1970s. At a general level, policy expansion is explained as the government’s response to increased needs. In any democratic nation, one normally expects that the weight of popular pressure and opinion, to some extent, influences the process of decision-making towards policy expansion. The literature identifies domestic problem pressure and demand as political motivations for environmental policy expansion.11 To explain the rise of Japan’s environmental regulations, a range of country-specific factors, such as the strength of the environmental advocacy coalition, the political opportunity structure and external events,12 might be relevant. Although no single factor explains the scope of any policy change, in my view, local governments’ “will and skill” for environmental policy innovations were a primary necessary condition for rapid legislative action at the national level in the early 1970s. There are two fundamental preconditions for this. First, local government occupies a strategic position straddling the division between the state and citizens. Local government is in a position to develop a safeguard to meet pressing needs beyond the

reach of the national state. Second, local government acts as an immediate rescue center to assure individuals’ security, a place to which local residents resort directly. This is primarily because the state’s inability to manage leaves it up to local communities to deal with the increasing presence of problem pressures and residents’ demands. Local communities are thus at the forefront of coping with this issue. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese local governments pioneered and developed a compensation scheme for industrial pollution victims, set stricter emissions regulations than those required by national law, and began to extensively use pollution control agreements or Pollution Countermeasure Agreements (PCAs), which were not required by national law but concluded between polluter(s) and host local government(s) to enforce stringent measures to combat pollution.13 In the 1970s, local governments even initiated the implementation of total pollutant load controls. The national government eventually accepted the necessity of these local actions and adopted some of the local innovations, such as the compensation scheme and the Total Pollutant Load Control System (TPLCS), at the national level.14 To explain why Japan began in the 1980s to lag behind major European countries such as Germany in environmental initiative and innovation, some focus on the circumstances under which environmental policy was initiated and argue that the policy environment had fundamentally changed due to improved air quality.15 Others point out the failure of Japanese environmental movements to establish powerful national interest groups16 as Japan subsequently had a very small and weakly organized community of environmental groups.17 The disintegration of anti-industrial pollution movements was seen as a reflection of shifts in public opinion.18 Such studies view policy formation as an essentially domestic-level process taking place within states. My objective, however, is to examine how the dynamics of environmental policy-making changed over time as environmental issues became internationalized.19 Traditional approaches of explaining this emerging phenomenon simply highlight the mutual interplay between separated levels of politics. Domestic factors are considered to be a determinant of foreign policy (“second image”)20 or the external environment is claimed to affect domestic politics (“second image reversed”).21 The “two-level-games” theory further suggests a shift from the domestic-foreign divide to an interactive levels approach while seeing the national representative in international negotiations as the key actor who takes into account the demands of actors at two levels: the domestic level and the international level.22 Yet this approach is still state-centric, although emphasizing the important influence of non-state and sub-national actors. It views these actors as interest groups who simply demand that the national representative protect their interests in international negotiations and restrict the scope of acceptable negotiation outcomes. In other words, non-state and sub-national actors impose constraints on the negotiations but do not directly operate in international institutional contexts. The use of “multi-level governance” helps us avoid these pitfalls of the two-level game. The assumption of multi-level governance is that beyond the two-level theorization there are other levels which

matter as well.23 Gary Marks and others draw attention to multi-level policy networks that may involve sub-national actors, such as socially mobilized groups and sub-national governments, interacting directly with international organizations.24 Some multi-level theories acknowledge that the legitimacy of multi-level governance depends on the legitimacy of democratic norms embedded within multi-level policy networks.25 Sub-national actors have increasingly considered themselves direct players in a global game to cope with the local impact of climate change.26 The dynamics of the sub-national level of participation reveal convergence, rather than a simple interplay of domestic and international politics. This can be seen as a rapidly expanding sphere of action in which the boundaries of domestic and foreign affairs are eroding. Boundary-eroding dynamics have become highly salient in the field of international environmental cooperation precisely because the causes of environmental risk are locally specific in character yet local action can simultaneously be part of global strategies. The necessity of integrating local actions to ensure the optimal reduction of environmental risks has been provided for in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs).27 In my view, the different dynamics of actors, interests, institutions, and political coalitions reflect the differences between division, interaction, and convergence in domestic-foreign linkages. The first analytical framework-division-views environmental policy-making as a fundamentally domestic-level process. Actors in the process of political coalition-building treat the reduction of environmental risk as a local or national public good whose benefits accrue to the public of a nation and correspond to national boundaries. The question of who bears the cost of providing the public good at the local or national level lies at the heart of environmental politics. In this insulated national game, domestic groups pressure the government to adopt favorable environmental policies, and politicians seek to maximize votes by constructing coalitions among domestic groups. Changes in the external environment are seen as exogenous in the sense that international affairs can influence domestic actors but only through one-way causation of the international-to-domestic connection. The second analytical framework-interaction-refers to environmental policy-making based on the simultaneous interplay between domestic interests and international bargaining or the two-way causation of domestic and international factors while presuming the different levels of domestic/foreign affairs. Environmental degradation may well spread beyond national borders and could have a regional/global range. Public intervention is thus required to provide both local/national and regional/international public goods for environmental riskreduction. Policy-makers deal with two sets of constraints: domestic constraints on cost-sharing for environmental risk-reduction and foreign pressures on collective action over resources to contribute regional/international environmental benefits. Environmental politics is a locus where policy-makers must choose how to reconcile international and domestic concerns. This decision-making arrangement creates new actors, especially national foreign policy actors-the export sector and the foreign policy elite-and as domestic factors, including the

distribution of domestic coalitions, impinge, the statesman seeks to maintain policy cohesion between the international and (intra-)national levels. It is inevitable then that the complexity of environmental policy-making entails much less coherence of the policy sector than that experienced in the insulated domesticlevel process. The third analytical framework-convergence-is defined as a penetration phenomenon where environmental policy-making at one level of government serves as decision-making in the political process of another. The reduction of industrial pollution by a municipal authority will improve air quality in the locality and, at the same time, the locally specific action may directly contribute to global governance for greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Environmental politics tends to revolve around coordinating the provision of intermeshed public goods. Beyond the state-centric presumption adopted by the second analytical framework, political actors interact across those levels and participate in multilevel coalition-building. The converged spheres of authority are linked by multiple actors moving across different governmental levels. This decision-making arrangement may involve sub-national actors dealing directly with foreign actors-overseas sub-national actors and international organizations. These emerging spheres provide potentials for policy integration among local action, national policy, and global strategies. The next section explores the expansion of environmental regulations over industrial pollution and voluntary agreements between business and government in the 1970s and the use of pro-business, market-oriented approaches to environmental protection in the 1980s. These two decades saw policy formation as an essentially domestic-level process. The following section presents the case study of Japan’s international bargaining over climate change in the 1990s. Environmental policy formation in the 1990s was quite compatible with much in the interactive two-level-games of constraints and opportunities on both the domestic and international levels. The penultimate section gives a view of, relatively unexplored, sub-national participation in international environmental regimes. It illustrates the emerging phenomenon of convergence from the perspective of the cross-border and cross-level harmonization of politics and policy. The final section analyses the transformation of these environmental affairs in terms of an eclectic interpretation of environmental politics operating along the lines of domestic/foreign division, interaction, and convergence.