Climate Change Policy: Can New Actors Affect Japan’s Policy-Making in the Paris Agreement Era?

This article examines changes in Japan’s policies related to climate change, focusing on three notable events that could have significantly altered Japan’s decisions on climate change: (a) the hosting of the Third Conference of the Parties (COP3) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997, (b) the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, and (c) the adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015 and its early enforcement in November 2016. The study shows that the Japanese government’s position remained fundamentally the same throughout these events. It called for emission reduction targets that would not harm the Japanese economy, considered nuclear power to be the least costly way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and avoided any mention of a 2°C mean global temperature rise as the long-term target. Meanwhile, after the Paris Agreement came into effect in 2016, an increasing number of Japanese private companies and local governments started taking voluntary actions to reduce their respective emissions, independent of national policy. These changes by sub/non-state actors have begun to alter decision-making at the national government level and could be a sign of transformational changes in Japan, wherein these new actors’ voices have a greater influence on Japan’s climate change policy than those of the traditional state-based actors.