ABSTRACT
After Fukushima, since 2011, the environment had to be taken into account in terms of the social economic system: the research and innovation paradigm had to be reinvented. To design a new energy policy in this context was to operate a mutation of interactions between the social economic system, the ecology, and the environment. The Japanese tacitly understand that they are the first industrial nation in this situation; they also understand that their political system is unable to manage such a transition. This mutation depends entirely on research and innovation policies, but of a different kind, difficult to conceptualize, design, and implement. This chapter’s goal is to analyze the problems that need to be solved and the experiments that have to be introduced and tested to fit this context and these goals. Some solutions have already been implemented outside Japan. The Japanese experiment is not a model, but a textbook to criticize and from which to learn. To be researched and debated is where these policy experiments will take industrial societies that have the epistemic capacity and political flexibility to advance in this direction. For the moment, Japan does not meet this challenge.
