Cognitive-strategic capabilities of a country are decisive for overcoming the strong path dependence in climate-related policies and to achieve ecological and economic modernization. This is the result of a unique comparison approach focusing on four highly intertwined policy areas (Automobiles, Nuclear Energy, Renewables and Rare Earth) in Japan and Germany. Both countries have in principle sufficient economic, technological and institutional capacities for an ecological transformation, but they are lacking an integrated policy strategy to mobilize and organize the existing capacities in favor of structural changes. The focused four policy areas are analyzed in depth and compared by experts from political science.

In the 1990s, Japan gradually began to turn green and started to experiment with more participatory forms of environmental governance. Ecological Modernisation and Japan explores this transformation and looks at Japan as a case for ecological modernisation while contextualising the discussion within its unique history and recent discussions about globalisation and sustainability. It makes a significant contribution to the ecological modernisation debate by unpacking the Japanese environmental experience.

In the 1990s, Japan gradually began to turn green and started to experiment with more participatory forms of environmental governance. Ecological Modernisation and Japan explores this transformation and looks at Japan as a case for ecological modernisation while contextualising the discussion within its unique history and recent discussions about globalisation and sustainability. It makes a significant contribution to the ecological modernisation debate by unpacking the Japanese environmental experience. Leading scholars in the field from Japan, the USA and the UK examine existing pressures on, and changes to, domestic environmental management structures. In addition, the book explores tensions that have emerged in relation to, and discourses that surround, the contemporary form of environmental governance in Japan. the post Johannesburg Summit era while at the same time, to incorporate concerns about the importance of promoting new indigenous approaches to policy-making more firmly based on the unique cultural characteristics of the Japanese.

John Dryzek provides an accessible introduction to thinking about the environment by looking at the way people use language on environmental issues. He analyses the main discourses from the last 30 years and those likely to be influential in future.

This volume explores institutional change and performance in the resource-rich Andean countries during the last resource boom and in the early post-boom years. The latest global commodity boom has profoundly marked the face of the resource-rich Andean region, significantly contributing to economic growth and notable reductions of poverty and income inequality. The boom also constituted a period of important institutional change, with these new institutions sharing the potential of preventing or mitigating the maladies extractive economies tend to suffer from, generally denominated as the “resource curse”. This volume explores these institutional changes in the Andean region to identify the factors that have shaped their emergence and to assess their performance. The interdisciplinary and comparative perspective of the chapters in this book provide fine-grained analyses of different new institutions introduced in the Andean countries and discusses their findings in the light of the resource curse approach. They argue that institutional change and performance depend upon a much larger set of factors than those generally identified by the resource curse literature. Different, domestic and external, economic, political and cultural factors such as ideological positions of decision-makers, international pressure or informal practices have shaped institutional dynamics in the region. Altogether, these findings emphasize the importance of nuanced and contextualized analysis to better understand institutional dynamics in the context of extractive economies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the extractive industries, natural resource management, political economics, Latin American studies and sustainable development. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the energy policies in the European Union and Japan in terms of electricity markets and climate action, including energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, and the reduction of emissions. The book evaluates and compares the regulatory frameworks for achieving energy transitions by answering a number of questions focused on the essence and range of the regulatory models used by leading global economies which herald carbon neutrality by 2050. The book provides a useful framework that systematises Japanese and European energy policies and legislation including electricity-related policies, plans, and programmes. Discussing these issues in relation to the European and Japanese 2050 energy transition the author delves into the four pillars of the transition: market reform, reduction of emissions, promotion of renewables, and enhancing energy efficiency. Each chapter demonstrates the timing of the actions undertaken both in Europe and Japan; analyses the character of the conducted actions, evaluates the stakeholders of the realised agenda; and presents the technologies involved in the energy transition.

That the notion of “sufficiency” is essential for a good life is an idea that enjoys support across many ethical, philosophical, religious and cultural persuasions. This notion reasserted itself in the study of sustainability once modern society reluctantly took cognizance of the limited low entropy energy and matter available for human appropriation. There is today therefore a general recognition of (i.e. not necessarily wide agreement on the merits of or needs for) notions of sufficiency as a species of environmentalism within secular communities. In this context, a critical question that invites our attention is how to effect sufficiency, and in particular of dealing with the daunting challenge of injustice as well as questions of distribution within and between countries that it brings to attention. Given sufficiency’s original home, as it were, in tradition, the modern world has tended to dismiss it or to plead to individual voluntary simplicity when faced with evidence asserting its necessity. Sufficiency is also often written away as a spiritual problem. The domain of ascetics and the religious. How to habilitate sufficiency in a political economy for the secular modern facing its biggest existential challenge yet, in the form of the environmental crisis?