Domestic institutions, international agendas, and global environmental protection in Japan and Germany.

Abstract

This work focuses on Japanese and German responses to air and atmospheric pollution problems from the period leading up to the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 to the period just after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. The dissertation compares and contrasts how Japan and Germany reacted to the emergence of a new more globally-oriented environmental paradigm during this period through case studies of acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and global climate change. The study examines how ideas, institutions, and actors are linked. It argues that Germany's more proactive and Japan's more reactive responses to the emergence of these new environmental policy concerns in the 1980s can be explained by differences in the strength of their environmental movements. In particular, the emergence of a Green Party in Germany strengthened the voice of environmental interests within the political system and helped to push new environmental policy concerns onto the political agenda. In contrast, Japan's environmental movement remained weak and focused on domestic policy concerns. This only changed in the late 1980s when powerful domestic policy actors found it in their best interest to take up global environmental protection as a policy concern. The differences in the strength of Japan's and Germany's environmental policy communities are related to how environmental citizens' movements became institutionalized in the two countries. These differences, however, were not fixed in stone. This work shows that the introduction of new ideas into the political process can change who the actors are that try to influence the policy process and at times, the institutions that mediate their interactions. In Germany, this meant the formation of a more proactive environmental policy community in the early 1980s. In Japan, a similar transformation occurred close to a decade later.