Subnational participation in extra-national policy solutions: Kitakyushu City as an intermediate agent in policy coordination

ABSTRACT

The growing challenges of environment and sustainable development stretch across scales of geographic space and require action at multiple levels of jurisdictions, such as individual level, community level, national level, and global level. Multilevel governance and cross-scale coordination will open up opportunities for a variety of stakeholders to participate in decision-making. While potentially increasing the capacity of governance, the cross-scale and multilevel approaches may face a difficulty in policy coordination created by the plurality of stakeholders and be attended with organizational complexity. This article will examine the potential of subnational participation to make a policy choice, mediated by local governments, to be congruent with global strategies and national mandates in a consistent way. To this end, it will bring a new perspective to Kitakyushu City's experience in Japan as a heuristic test case study. My claim is that subnational actors occupy a strategic position to straddle the division between state and society, between the center and the periphery, and between the domestic and the foreign so they can act as an intermediate agent in reconnecting local action with national policy and turning global strategies into local action for problem solving.

KEYWORDS:

• Local government
• international cooperation
• policy coordination
• hierarchized tiers
• de-hierarchized spheres
• Kitakyushu

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Masaharu Hori, Azuma Kido, Kōichi Sueyoshi, and Susan Takao.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, the term ‘local government’ is used to denote subnational governments of the Japanese two-tier system: municipalities and prefectures.

2. In practice, since the 1992 Earth Summit recognition of subnational governments as key players in global sustainability strategies, the areas of development assistance and environmental cooperation have become a focal point of decentralized international cooperation activities. The 2000 Millennium Development Goals, which identify local authorities as crucial actors in tackling poverty challenges, have created a further legitimate setting for sub-national involvement.

3. In the early debate on transnational politics, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1974, p. 41) confined the concept of transnationalism to the activities of nongovernmental actors, differentiating from those of ‘transgovernmental actors’ or ‘sub-units of governments on those occasions when they act relatively autonomously from higher authority in international politics.’ According to Risse-Kappen (1995, p. 9), however, the interactive relations of government actors across national boundaries can be considered transnational ‘when at least one actor pursues her own agenda independent of national decisions.’ The necessity of this redefinition suggests that the distinction between state-based actors and nongovernmental actors has become blurred as sub-national government actors look to transnational networks to gain support in the absence of national government action. Actors in the de-hierarchized spheres of subnational governments may include: international organizations, NGOs, advocacy and research groups, the media, and consumer organizations.

4. According to Air Pollution Control Law of 1968 and Water Pollution Control Law of 1970, a wide range of countermeasures is prescribed, including reporting on construction or installation of emission sources, setting permissible pollutant discharge standards from the emission source, regular guidance and on-site inspections of factories and businesses, and enforcing the law. Local governments are responsible for taking these measures. There are many cases in which, reflecting location-specific conditions in individual localities, discharge standards imposed by local ordinances are much stricter than those prescribed in the national laws.

5. The KITA was established in 1980 as a non-profit organization under the joint auspices of the Kitakyushu Junior Chamber, the Kitakyushu Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Western Japan Industry Club, in collaboration with Kitakyushu municipal government and Fukuoka prefectural government. Its mission was to contribute to the promotion of international cooperation at the grassroots level by providing training opportunities for technology transfer, research and development and up-dating of training materials.

6. Material provided by Consulate General of Vietnam in Fukuoka, Japan on October 9 2015.

7. In 2010, the city has created the Kitakyushu Asian Center for Low Carbon Society, to act as a key organization dedicated to promotion of local economies through a commitment to carbon reduction projects in Asian societies.

8. The JCM is a carbon crediting mechanism through which Japanese companies can earn carbon credits by investing in technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries.

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Yasuo Takao

Yasuo Takao is a senior lecturer of political science at the Department of Social Sciences and Security Studies, Curtin University. His current research interest resides in the area of societal transnationalism at the grassroots level in Japan. His latest publication is Japan's Environmental Politics and Governance: From Trading nation to Eco-Nation (Routledge 2016).