ABSTRACT
The collaborative relationship between Shiga Prefecture and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) to create the International Lake Environment Committee (ILEC) was Japan’s earliest experience of sub-national participation in international cooperation with counterparts from the developing world and international organizations. The ILEC is an international nongovernmental standing committee, which has been hosted by Shiga’s prefectural government since 1986. One of its key missions is to support environmentally sound lake management activities, which UNEP promotes in developing countries. The objective of this chapter is to examine the local government’s autonomous capacity to mobilize resources across institutional boundaries of polity and independently participate in transnational environmental governance. From a state-centric view, a sub-national level of participation at the international level can only be feasible if it is an active part of national policy. In the case of the Shiga prefectural government’s initiative for international lake-environmental cooperation, however, as Table 5.1 indicates, sub-national actors came to see themselves as direct players in the absence of national policy. The chapter examines under what conditions and in what ways such a sub-national level of participation takes place by conducting a case study of Shiga’s collaboration with UNEP over lake-environment risk reduction. It reveals the formation process of transnational governance networks involving a sub-national government that is not operating on behalf of the national government. Shiga’s cooperation with UNEP was primarily driven by the ad hoc, bottom-up political mobilization of sub-national actors. In general, without institutionalized channels for subnational governments to participate in the international level, sub-national governments need to mobilize resources on such an ad hoc basis and pioneering sub-national actors need to be capable of effectively engaging in the formation process of transnational governance in unfamiliar territory. This chapter is about the management story of Lake Biwa in Shiga prefecture. The lake is completely located within Shiga prefecture, situated across most municipalities in the prefecture, with its surface area of 674.4 square kilometers occupying one-sixth of the prefecture’s total area. In the environmental policy area of Japanese history, as environmental impacts were manifested locally and adaptive capacity determined by local conditions, municipal governments
became the first movers. Given the geographical setting of the lake, however, the initiatives for environmental policy were taking place at the prefectural level. The Shiga prefectural government reached out for international environmental cooperation on behalf of voters who found it impossible to ignore the severity of lake pollution and whose concern with it prevailed over pro-development policies in electoral processes. While the worsening eutrophication of the rivers and lakes became known as a worldwide problem, local knowledge and experience in Japan was not sufficient to cope with the Lake Biwa’s environmental stresses. This led the prefectural Environmental Bureau to develop a lake environment policy network with overseas counterparts, which provided them with the process of learning about lake environments.1 These actors transnationally engaged in policy innovation and coordination by diffusing ideas and influencing the policy measures adopted in other countries.2 In the process of policy networking, the under-funded and overloaded UNEP3 began to work with Shiga prefecture to meet the need to decentralize environmental governance functions, in order to pave the way for future environmental problem-solving.4
