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and serves as a secretary general of the East Asian Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. He has published and edited several books on environment and development, policy and governance, including Green Growth and Low Carbon Development in

While a multi-level perspective on system innovation offers an analytical tool for explaining the role of landscape development and niche innovations in a transition of infrasystems toward sustainability, it has limitations in capturing hard-fought, inter-and intra-scalar contestations, and thus in exploring the role of governance structure and institution in a transition.Against this background, this paper aims to explore how the temporal dimension have influenced market competition, power and interpretation, and the dynamics of electricity systems in a welfare state by examining Japan as a case study.Our conclusions are as follows. First, periods of possessing and exercising power are important, both in terms of reinforcing the current infrasystem and in moving it toward a sustainable pathway.The longer that incumbents and their alliance possess and exercise power, the deeper that infrasystems can be embedded into society and the narrower the space created by landscape pressures becomes for developing niche innovators. Second, long time dominance of incumbents and its alliance in power enables them to capitalize on landscape pressures to reinforce them, realigning the currently unsustainable electricity system while to prevent sustainable niche innovations from sufficiently developed as reliable alternatives. Third, it can change the extent of feedback effects in policy instruments and institutional reform, weakening driving force for transition to sustainability.

When developed countries started providing environmental aid to developing countries, they faced three types of barriers that made such aid ineffective: Conflicting concerns, contracting problems, and lack of capacity. Donors have responded over time with changing policy contents and implementing strategies to convince recipient countries to change their own policies. However, they have taken such steps in different ways. This article examines the ways that bilateral and multilateral donors have adjusted their environmental aid and the results of such adjustments, taking Japan as the center of analysis and comparing it with Germany, Denmark, and the World Bank. The main findings are as follows. First, to overcome the barriers, donors changed their strategy for convincing recipients to make policy change and/or shifted their focus to lower income recipients to take advantage of asymmetric power relations, whereas making minor adjustments to initial policy contents and design within the same environmental discourse. Second, responses to the barriers varied among the donors, reflecting their policy orientation in the environmental discourse, their power relationship with the recipients, and their resource mobilization capacity. Third, sustainability and enforcement of the changed policy depends mainly on the policy contents rather than on the policy change strategy.

This article examines the effect of development assistance programs on Local Agenda 21 (LA21) programs in three municipalities of Thailand. First, the article examines institutional changes in Thailand geared toward decentralization. Second, the article analyzes the effect based on the frameworks of Noda and Ouchi for the level of participation. The results indicate that participation was a top—down participation of local residents who presumed some benefits from the municipality in exchange for their attendance in meetings. Third, the article evaluates the effect in terms of project efficiency. The results show that municipalities conducted most of the actions declared in their LA21 but the sustainability of these actions is questionable. It is contended that LA21 has its limitations as a planning guide for sustainable cities in developing countries. An assistance program should be designed that helps the government of a developing country to institutionalize meaningful involvement for a participatory environmental policy formation.

Recently, developed and emerging countries have increasingly adopted the principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR) to reduce waste. In 2003, South Korea replaced the waste deposit recycling (WDR) program with the EPR program. Previous comparative analyses between the WDR and EPR programs have been qualitative evaluations and have not yet quantitatively shown whether the change has increased benefits. The aim of this paper is to explore which program brings larger net benefits. Because of limited data availability, here we focus on metal packaging exclusively. We find that the recycling rate dropped from 59% in 2000 to 40% in 2011 and recycling volume dropped accordingly. Cost-benefit incidence analysis shows that net social benefits decreased by 2.8 billion won (2.5 million US dollars), while the net benefits to producers increased by 1.9 billion won (1.7 million US dollars) under the EPR program compared with the WDR program. The government of South Korea should set an ambitious recycling target and narrow the scope of the exemption from the mandatory recycling requirement.

There is an ongoing debate about criteria based on which allocation of climate finance, particularly financing adaptation, is made. This article aims at investigating the determinants of fund allocation and the consequences of rearrangement considering the case of the Adaptation Fund (AF). This research conducts a mixed-method approach including binary logistic regression and multiple regressions to analyze the factors that influence access to and volume of funding from the AF, respectively, along with a qualitative assessment of the AF’s institutional features. The findings suggest that the level of vulnerability of a country is likely to affect accessibility to and the volume of funding from the AF. Besides, low-income countries are more likely while least developed countries are less likely to access the fund. Readiness of country is not significant for accessing the AF; however, it affects the volume of funding. Funding allocation rearrangement may put the AF on pressure for effective use of the readiness program.

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