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Knowledge in the Global Atmospheric Policy Process: The Case of Japan
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Abstract
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In Chapter 9, Atsuko Sato highlights various levels of international policy making. She does this by focusing on the role of knowledge in shaping Japan's responses to stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change. Until recent decades, few people seriously considered the global atmosphere as an appropriate subject of international politics. Today, however, it is widely understood that the atmosphere is not only a part of the global commons, but that it is in danger of severe human-induced degradation. At the same time, however, global atmospheric science remains uncertain, and it is in the face of these uncertainties that international efforts to protect the ozone layer and to halt global warming have taken place. Adopting a social constructionist framework, which focuses on the interaction of knowledge and policy making, to examine the linkages between international and domestic political processes in Japan, Sato's chapter looks at the manner in which the Japanese have interpreted developments in global atmospheric science and how has this interpretation shaped Japan's foreign policy making and its participation in the development of international atmospheric regimes. Sato is concerned with why and when a particular understanding of the global atmospheric crises emerged and became politically relevant in Japan.
To analyze Japan's response to global atmospheric problems, Sato traces the development of knowledge in the process of science and policy construction. By tracing knowledge, the chapter illuminates a diverse group of factors, such as science, environmental values, apolitical interests, power, and disparate actors such as scientists and scientific communities, policymakers, the media, industries, environmental groups, other states, and international institutions. All of these actors are knowledge-constructors and/or knowledge-transmitters, and in the flow of knowledge they insert their political and environmental interests and values into the policy process. Three periods are studied in Sato's chapter: (1) the initial stage of ozone science and politics in the 1970s; (2) the period leading to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which was agreed in 1987; and (3) the relationship between climate science and politics between 1988 and 1997, when Japan hosted COP3. Sato finds that, by themselves, scientific knowledge flows do not matter as much as we might expect. To have substantial impact, they must be accompanied by a broader shift in attitude, thinking, and perceptions - "discourse shift." In Japan, a major discourse shift occurred between the 1970s, when the country was focused almost exclusively on domestic pollution problems, and the late 1980s, when international environmental issues grew in prominence. This is particularly significant given the uncertainty in atmospheric science. Japan's more recent commitment to climate change politics should therefore be understood as an outgrowth of global environmental discourse and the adoption of the "precautionary principle" in Japanese society.
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