ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to cast light on the exceptional: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG), which has never received any Local Allocation Tax money, not since the 1953 establishment of this equalization grant system. Wealthy Tokyo has been able to utilize a much greater degree of financial flexibility and autonomy than any other local government. The mega metropolis has initiated many policy innovations ahead of the national government. One of these innovations was Japan’s first mandatory emissions trading scheme, launched in April 2010 by the TMG. The process of adopting such a policy idea is extremely complex and requires a close examination of the political context in which the idea is learned, articulated, contested, adapted, and accepted by agents, both individual and collective. Why and how was the world’s first urban scheme for a mandatory reduction of total emissions adopted in Tokyo and not elsewhere? What might cause the diffusion of this idea in other urban areas? One key explanation behind idea adoption is a policy evolution of trial-and-error lessons about effective policy design, desirable policy goals, and politically feasible judgments. This study finds that both agency effects and structural opportunities of policy adoption in the case of Tokyo’s cap-and-trade are too specific to result in a more coherent diffusion of ideas, policies, and practices in other urban areas. Although there are signs of a diffusion of Tokyo’s cap-and-trade throughout Japan, this is more likely to derive from mimicking behaviors than from learning. The policy transfer of Tokyo’s capand-trade requires continuous learning about adaptive capacity to make it a better fit for locally specific conditions. Metropolitan regions generate the bulk of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as they are responsible for the consumption of the majority of the world’s energy. Sub-national governments in these population centers are increasingly initiating action on climate change. In this chapter, the Tokyo Metropolitan cap-and-trade system will be used as a single case study. Launched in April 2010 by the TMG, it is the world’s first urban model of a mandatory reduction of total CO2 emissions. Experimentation at local scales presents a unique testing opportunity for both subnational and national governments to achieve their climate policy goals. Climate change mitigation, once provided, becomes a global public good. No country can be excluded from the consumption opportunities of mitigation benefits. But the effectiveness of mitigation depends on the aggregate effort of all
countries, and equally important, it will inevitably need to adapt to local conditions for the implementation of mitigation measures. Specific policy tools can enhance the effectiveness of mitigation at the local scale. Policy learning is one such tool used to overcome impediments to policy-relevant decision-making. Learning, which may lead to policy diffusion, may be a key candidate for disentangling the mechanisms of local policy innovation. The process of adopting policy ideas raises questions regarding why a specific policy idea is adopted in one place and not elsewhere and why some agents can be more responsive to the same idea than others. This chapter will present a map of causal pathways and factors accounting for policy diffusion effects. It is a detailed case study that looks beneath the aggregate relationships of policy learning and diffusion to more qualitative evidence of governing bodies interacting at different phases of policy adoption within the urban scheme of a mandatory reduction of total emissions. The causal mechanism of policy adoption will be described as sequences of events regarding the adoption of Tokyo’s cap-and-trade. The focus is on the whole causal process leading to a better process-oriented understanding of adopting policy ideas. Yet, to pinpoint complex diffusion patterns, it attempts to observe the process in a highly specific way by conceptualizing a diffusion mechanism of learning. It is the objective of this study to disentangle the process of policy adoption by an agent, the TMG, which constitutes the unit of analysis. The chapter is structured to examine how the adoption of Tokyo’s cap-and trade can be explained in terms of the lessons learned from their own past or from other places elsewhere. I ultimately argue that Tokyo’s policy learning is not easily adopted elsewhere due to the unique characteristics of the capital megacity.
