Tracing the Local Origins of Farmland Policies in Japan—Local-National Policy Transfers and Endogenous Institutional Change

Japan’s agricultural support and protection regime appears as a particularly persistent relict of the country’s postwar political economy. Yet, it is also by no means static. This article frames the trajectory of Japan’s agricultural support and protection regime as a process of gradual endogenous institutional change. The pace and direction of this process are not only determined on the macro level, but also in the ‘local’. To illustrate this argument, the article traces the local origins of recent policies toward farmland consolidation surrounding a major revision of the Agricultural Land Law in 2009. This revision deregulated corporate farmland access, but also prepared the ground for a new approach to public farmland allocation to expanding farms. The latter was sourced from certain local farmland governance models. At a closer look, these local models are not only ‘best practices’ to achieve farmland consolidation, but also reflect the ‘defensive’ interests of the incumbent local stakeholders of the postwar agricultural support and protection regime, such as the local branches of JA, the powerful organization of agricultural cooperatives. More generally, the article proposes to understand local-national policy transfers as a mode of endogenous institutional change.