ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to examine the importance of public participation in the production and use of environmental science, with special reference to “expert citizens” who can facilitate and mediate between experts and laypeople. Local government occupies a strategic position between state and civil society and between domestic and foreign affairs in terms of its ability to influence others. Local authorities, who are not only equipped with expert knowledge but also motivated by their concerns for local experience and problems, are expected to help laypeople effectively engage with resourceful stakeholders to redress inequitable distributions of environmental burdens and promoting two-way symmetrical communication rather than the one-way asymmetrical communication associated with expert persuasion. Yet the key problem boils down to local authorities’ willingness and capability to utilize this strategic position to be responsive to the needs of society and thus foster legitimacy in policy-making. Not all local authorities possess this willingness and capability to help lessresourceful laypeople build their capacity to make decisions on an equal footing with experts. As uncertainty, inherent in the complexity of environmental science, increases, there are calls to refashion expert knowledge into a more citizen-expert interactive governance. In the United States (US), the way that lay people can participate in scientific knowledge application and policy-making is organized through grassroots and national environmental organizations, such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). In Japan, such professional associations that build networks of interaction with scientific experts, policymakers, interest groups, and the media, have yet to emerge on a wider scale. The study of expert citizens is largely unexplored in Japan’s environmental policy. Nonetheless, voluntary citizens individually or collectively have developed their expertise over many years and have begun to play an intermediary role at the local level. This chapter will analyze the potential roles of expert citizens by conducting case studies of two Japanese localities, Shiki and Jōyō cities. In his influential article, “Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital,” Robert Putnam has drawn attention to the fact that Americans no longer actively participate in politics or trust their government’s ability to have the answers to economic and social problems.1 In 1995 when he published this chapter, Japan’s voter turnouts were the lowest in its electoral history and participation in electoral
politics was at near-crisis levels. Voter turnouts for local elections dropped to 55 percent in the mid-1990s, the lowest level seen in postwar Japan.2 Representative democracy in post-WWII Japan is now at a crossroads: Japan’s voter turnout has been continually low and floating voters, who drift from party to party or between turnout and abstention at actual elections, have continued to increase. Does this mean that Japanese people are “bowling alone”? This is not necessarily a sign of widespread political apathy but can be a warning against the old pork barrel politics, which has given favors to special interest groups in the past. In this respect, political alienation rather than apathy may appropriately explain the degree and nature of political participation in Japan. The country is now facing a time like no other in the history of modern Japan; there is an exceptionally high demand for an alternative way of politics. Reformists or new political groups are expected to turn this opportunity into democracy building. Forwardlooking citizens’ groups in Japan are proposing an alternative form of political renewal in the issue area of environmental protection. Generally speaking, laypeople are increasingly excluded from partaking, even indirectly, in environmental policy-making. One of the major factors, which may contribute to political alienation, is the increasingly technical area of policymaking since the public remains outside the policy debates. As Henrik Bang suggests, the key problem of contemporary politics is political exclusion rather than free riding.3 Such exclusion appears to lead to the professionalization of political participation that can be seen as a venue of governance networks with the intertwining of scientific experts, policy-makers, interest groups, and the media.4 Bang thus proposes to assume:
The more ECs (expert citizens), and the more willing ECs become to cooperate with each other and more established top elites, the greater the likelihood that ECs will exclude laypeople from the discursive construction of new publics and modes of democratic governance.5
