Is Post-Fukushima Reform Making Japan Safer? From Shared Responsibility to Collective Accountability
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12351687 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yasuo Takao (0000-0002-8425-8476, Social Sciences and International Relations, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 49-69 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Japanese Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1037-1397 • E-ISSN: 1469-9338 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10371397.2023.2184332 |
| OpenAlex | W4322732533 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
Ten years after the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear safety regulation system in Japan has gradually moved from the exclusionary process of policy making, based on hierarchically organized policy, to a decentralized and open process of policy making whose competence is divided beyond the pre-given political actors. Yet policy making and implementation need to bring together multiple stakeholders to work in concert to achieve a desired outcome of nuclear safety. This article seeks to explain why the trend towards more inclusive forms of policy making may still lead to negative consequences for democratic accountability of nuclear safety. The author argues that the coordination issue becomes critical to a plurality of conflicting interests and beliefs of autonomous stakeholders. Although the decision-making plurality favours democratic interest representation, empirical evidence suggests that a poorly coordinated response by the national government to nuclear policy implementation fails to get stakeholders to work together for Japan’s nuclear safety. From a broader perspective, the lack of coordination among different stakeholders is one of the weaknesses of expanding accountability mechanisms to include more stakeholders, and results in challenges to policy coherence
Accountability · Competence (human resources · Democracy · Economics · Management · Political science · Politics · Public relations · SAFER · Work (physics · Engineering · Law · Policy Transfer and Learning · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies · Public Administration · Risk Perception and Management
Theories of the Policy Process
Interactive GovernanceAdvancing the Paradigm
What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance?
Policy change and learning
Environmental Politics in Japan
The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability
The Business of the Japanese State
The Governance of Transnational Environmental Harm
Accountability’
Toward a processual understanding of policy integration
Reforms as experiments
Nuclear Power Development in Japan
Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems
Metagovernance and nuclear power in Europe
The advocacy coalition framework
Risk Culture in Public and Private Organizations
Games Real Actors Could Play
Evaluating the Advocacy Coalition Framework
The Risk Game and the Blame Game
Nuclear Policy and Regulation in Japan after Fukushima
Using Cultural Theory to Analyze the Metagovernance of the Nuclear Renaissance in Britain, France, and the United States
Are Public Sector Workers More Risk Averse Than Private Sector Workers
A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan
All Politics is Local
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |