ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first test case that will examine the traditional statecentric coordination of government policy. Nuclear energy in Japan has been a strong top-down national undertaking, establishing a division of labor among levels of government with a state-centric gate-keeping capacity (a state’s capacity to influence policy decisions at sub-national levels of government). The key aim of state-centric policy coordination is to effectively control progress at subnational levels and ensure aggregate progress at the national scale and further within the context of international obligations. Central-local relations are institutionalized to clarify sub-national roles in achieving national goals and extend incentives as well as giving tutelage towards sub-national governments. Subnational actors are expected primarily to play an implementation role in achieving national targets. The issue area of nuclear energy, however, is the most complex of all; state-centric coordination occurs both within and across policy subsystems.1 As far as issues of nuclear energy are concerned, the foreign policy, industrial policy, energy and environmental protection subsystems are closely related to each other. The actions of actors from these subsystems are causally linked to each other. The nuclear energy policy subsystem in Japan has largely been nested within another subsystem, namely, industrial policy, and partially overlapped with other subsystems, especially environmental protection and foreign policy. Overlapping subsystem boundaries are thus presumed to affect policy coordination while the success of policy coordination requires the policy beliefs of political actors to be congruent with each other.2 The situation of nuclear energy generation is further complicated when dealing with nuclear security, which automatically brings international-level attention to domestic issues. According to the advocacy coalition framework (ACF ), policy change can be the result of shocking events, both internal and external to the policy subsystem.3 It appears that neither the Fukushima meltdowns (an internal subsystem event or failures in subsystem practices) nor the consequent change in public opinion (an external subsystem event or public preference in favor of a nuclear phase-out) changed the policy beliefs of the dominant pro-nuclear coalition. Consequently, Shinzo Abe declared a nuclear phase-out would be irresponsible for the resource-poor nation. The catastrophic Fukushima accident in March 2011 led to a review of the safety of nuclear power plants worldwide. In the aftermath, Germany permanently
shut down eight of its reactors and pledged to close all of the country’s 17 reactors by 2022. Switzerland also announced plans to phase out its reactors operation by 2034. In June 2011 Italians voted against a return to nuclear energy in a national referendum, cancelling a law that would allow for the construction of new reactors. In the United States (US), on the other hand, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created incentives such as loan guarantees and tax credits to promote reactor construction and the United Kingdom (UK) government also decided in 2008 to support the building of new nuclear power stations. In these pro-nuclear energy countries, however, little progress has been made towards building new nuclear power stations and the building of new reactors in the world’s most nuclear-dependent country, France, is being delayed due to rising costs in a postFukushima safety climate. While there is continued growth in nuclear energy production and use in non-OECD Asia, following the Fukushima catastrophe, even China suspended the approval of all new reactors until the completion of a nuclear-safety review. In Japan, however, Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government has stubbornly shown its eagerness for idle reactors to be restarted against a public opinion that has remained largely opposed to it due to nuclear safety fears following the Fukushima disaster. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which was in power during the time of the Fukushima disaster, had pledged to phase out nuclear power generation. By September 2013, all 54 of the country’s commercial reactors were offline. On April 11, 2014, Abe’s Cabinet officially reversed the DPJ’s decision by adopting a new Basic Energy Plan that would push for restarting the idled reactors.4 This new plan declared nuclear energy as “an important source of base-load electricity supply.” Currently 24 reactors are in the process of restart approvals, which are required to meet the upgraded safety standards of the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA). In August 2015, Japan put its first nuclear reactor, the Sendai 1 reactor, back into operation under new safety rules. Japan’s government plans to raise the share of nuclear power generation back to 20-22 percent by 2030 while also “working to reduce nuclear dependence as much as possible.” Before the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, the Japanese government had promoted nuclear energy as “safe, cheap and able to reduce CO2 emissions in the fight against climate change.” By then there was an established knowledge of the costs and the safety of nuclear energy that was credible in both policy-makers’ and scientists’ eyes in Japan. Researchers had initiated a series of pioneering research projects on this topic and consolidated the literature into a body of empirically solid findings indicating that nuclear power generation is more costly than coal, hydro and gas.5 The cost items of nuclear energy generation, as found in the literature, are extremely complex, accounting for generation costs, decommissioning/waste disposal costs, capital costs (research and development and site preparation), and external costs to society (insurance and compensation for nuclear accidents). Following the Fukushima accident, the Cost Review Committee of the government’s Energy and Environment Council estimated generation costs for 2010 to be ¥8.9 per kWh (11.4 US cents), which was one and a
half times higher than the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI)’s estimate for 1999.6 This newest estimate included additional costs for postFukushima safety measures, government policy expenses, and future nuclear risk reduction. In 2012 the Japanese government virtually nationalized Tokyo Electronic Power Co. (TEPCO) with a one trillion yen ($9.59 billion) injection of public funds and subsequently added more taxpayer money for the compensation, decontamination, and decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. It thus became clear that nuclear power was not viable without government subsidies. In December 2012 the LDP won a landslide victory in a House of Representatives election, ejecting the DPJ from power after three years. On April 11, 2014, Abe’s Cabinet decided to break away from the energy strategy, initiated in 2012 by the DPJ government, to phase out nuclear power and push for the restart of reactors. Why does the conservative government take an unyielding pronuclear stance against public concerns? This chapter identifies the causal mechanisms of policy transformation to answer this question. What accounts for the patterns and nature of Japan’s nuclear energy policy? Traditionally, the literature described energy policy in Japan as dominated by what Jeffrey Broadbent calls the “ruling triad” or three main actors of the pro-growth coalition.7 Japanese leaders were reluctant to equate environmental risk with a potential failure in nuclear energy policy and most scholars also did not focus on the environmental risks of nuclear energy, but rather on the industrial contributions of nuclear energy. Richard Samuels explained the transformation of Japan’s nuclear energy policy as a continual process of negotiation and coordination between the bureaucracy and private industry.8 In this process, a bureaucratic turf war was highlighted for control over jurisdiction and budgets9 and a single veto player, the dominant LDP, allowed utilities to charge consumers and subsidized loans for nuclear energy development,10 while anti-nuclear energy activism activities hardly moved outside the host communities where nuclear power plants were to be located.11 In the early 1990s, due to growing opposition in Japan to nuclear energy, some began to argue that the influence of “outside forces” must not be underestimated.12 The debate following the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster has revolved around the future role of nuclear power in Japan’s energy policy and many argue that a transformation of energy systems is required to overcome domestic obstacles.13 Studies of Japan’s nuclear energy policy generated a wealth of institutional detail, yet individually they were not suited to the task of either identifying the factors that determine differences and similarities across countries in the patterns and nature of nuclear energy policy or examining the factors that cause policy change, as there is an increasing gap between public preference and government responsiveness in nuclear energy policy. This chapter will combine the dimensions of collective action (ACF ) with the more static forms of institutional access (political opportunity structures-POS) to help identify the causal variables and mechanisms that explain nuclear energy policy in different domestic structures. Political opportunity structures are not always stable, changing political environments, such as unstable political alignments and divided elites, provide a greater potential to alter the levels and
patterns of institutional access to policy-makers in the policy subsystem, while the interaction of actors and structures may recreate the access levels and patterns. The predominance of economic over environmental concerns in Japan’s nuclear energy policy reflects the distribution of power within the government. The power of the Japanese economic bureaucracy extends into nuclear energy policy yet a long-term process of political realignment since the early 1990s would seem to have changed the nature of the resources and constraints external to the policy subsystem of nuclear energy. External subsystem events or shocks also define a broader political environment and they are necessary but not sufficient for policy change.14 Types of external events, such as “socio-economic conditions” and “public opinion,” which are identified by the ACF, are fluid, unstable, and always changing. It is not clear under what conditions they are sufficient to account for policy change. Crises and disasters, whether external or internal to the policy subsystem, may abruptly bring about changes in economic conditions or turn public opinion against current policy. The electoral process may further link the changing tide of public preference to policy changes. The specific causal link between external/internal events and policy change can vary from one case to another. Finally, factors, internal to coalitions, such as different self-interests of individual groups within a coalition, deserve closer examination. The ACF assumes that core beliefs hold advocacy coalitions together and do not change easily. However, such policy core beliefs can be unstable within an advocacy coalition as material groups, such as utility companies in nuclear energy policy, seek their own material gains.15 In other words, there is a potential for policy change due to internal subsystem factors. We need to examine the ways in which the selfinterests of groups, rather than their normative commitment, come first in explaining the intra-decision-making and maintenance of an advocacy coalition.
