Sub-national level of participation in international environmental cooperation: the role of Shiga Prefecture for Lake Biwa environment in Japan

Abstract

From a state-centric view, sub-national level of participation at the international level can be only feasible if it is an active part of national policy. In the case of Shiga prefectural government's initiative for international lake-environmental cooperation, however, sub-national actors came to see themselves as direct players in the absence of national policy. This study examines under what conditions and in what ways such sub-national level of participation takes place by conducting a case study of Shiga's collaboration with the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) over lake-environment risk reduction. The article finds that the process of Shiga's participation in transnational governance will have less chance of being duplicated effectively in other Japanese sub-national governments. Shiga's cooperation with the UNEP was primarily driven by the ad hoc bottom-up political mobilisation of the sub-national actors. In general, without institutionalised channels for sub-national governments to participate in the regional/international level, sub-national governments need to mobilise resources on such an ad hoc basis and only pioneering sub-national actors are capable of effectively engaged on unfamiliar territory with the formation process of transnational governance.

Keywords:

• transnational governance
• sub-national government
• international environmental cooperation
• UNEP
• Japan

Notes

As environmental impacts are manifested locally and adaptive capacity is determined by local conditions, municipal governments were first movers in the environmental policy area of Japanese history. However, the lake is completely encompassed within Shiga Prefecture, situated across most municipalities in the prefecture, with its surface area of 674.4 km2 occupying one-sixth of the prefecture's total area. The policy initiatives were taking place at the prefectural level.

For the politics of telling compelling “causal stories” for agenda setting, see Stone (1989).

As of 2002, 87% (41) of 47 prefectures, 100% (12) of 12 “designated cities” – population at least 500,000, 21% (6) of 29 “core cities” – population at least 300,000, and 2.5% of cities with a population larger than 50,000 (nearly 500 municipalities) had been involved in international environmental cooperation at some level. Those activities had been engaged predominantly in the form of accepting overseas trainees (100% of those municipalities involved), holding international conferences/seminars (32%), and dispatching experts abroad (24%). Most of the training, offered by those local governments, has been under a national programme run by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a state agency which is responsible for the technical cooperation of Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) programmes. See Ministry of the Environment (2004, p. 166). It is also important to note that there are a few exceptional projects for which municipalities, such as Kitakyushu and Hiroshima, have participated in the implementation stage of ODA-funded “Japan-China Environmental Model City Projects”. These Japanese municipalities have transferred a comprehensive set of their environmental management and technology to Chinese counterpart municipalities.

For the notion of framing, see Snow et al. (1986) and Keck and Sikkink (1998, pp. 2–3).

This section is based on Author's interview with T. Kagatsume, Shiga, Japan, 12 May 2010 and Author's interview with H. Kotani, Shiga, Japan, 12 May 2010.

The World Lake Vision resulted from a series of meetings and consultations with scientists, policy-makers and politicians from a number of drafts that had been produced between 2001 and 2003 by a Drafting Committee. The need for the sustainable use of fresh water had been previously addressed at the international arena, such as those stated in the Dublin Principles, Chapter 18 of Agenda 21, and the World Water Vision. However, the unique properties of lakes had never been specifically addressed in these previous efforts. In 2003 the World Lake Vision was introduced at the 3rd World Water Forum to draw the attention of citizens groups, lake managers, scientists, and policy-makers.

To integrate the World Lake Vision into a practical action programme, in 2005 the World Lake Vision Action Project was adopted at the 4th World Water Forum. In the following year, it called for action reports from around the world. The World Lake Vision Action Report Committee, comprising 30 lake management experts, continued to synthesise the lessons learned from the locally specific experiences into a comprehensive assessment of the application of the World Lake Vision principles and then facilitated further application of these principles to local lake visions around the world. See WLVARC (2007).