Identifying the ‘Fukushima Effect’ in Germany through policy actors’ responses: evidence from the G-GEPON 2 survey

Abstract

The nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, on March 11, 2011 ("3.11") prompted global changes in national energy policies. Public discourse created the image that "Fukushima" had prompted Germany's Energiewende, and much research asking why the reaction of decision makers in Germany was significantly different from those in Japan has been conducted since that time. However, the effect on policy actors themselves in the policy-making network has been overlooked. Taking Germany's socio-political history into account, we question such conclusions and argue that the measurable effect is much less than some conclude. Using an unconventional merged methods research design and innovative survey instrument with a policy-actor-network approach (the G-GEPON 2 Survey), we asked major German policy actors, interest groups, stakeholders, and civil society actors about their opinions, attitudes and governmental support regarding energy policy decisions pre-and post-Fukushima. We found that an established institutional landscape of policy actors and their cooperation in policy processes has not been affected by 3.11. New forms of inquiry for policy research show the potential to provide insights into policy processes which were not measurable with traditional single-method inquiries. Furthermore, we have found that emulation of national legal frameworks must consider socio-political traditions. We attempt to create new forms of investigation to reveal hidden structures in policy processes which are empirically difficult to grasp.

What Can Politics Learn from Management Decisions? A Case Study of Germany’s Exit from Nuclear Energy after Fukushima

“…Movements against even the non-military use of nuclear energy began to emerge in Western Europe in the seventies of the last century, especially when the construction of nuclear power plants increased as a result of the first so-called oil crisis (see, e.g., [1]. In the year 2000, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (7th chancellor of Germany from 1998 until November 2005, Social Democratic Party) has commonly agreed with the operators of nuclear power plants to limit the electricity production from nuclear energy and to phase-out nuclear power (e.g., [2]). This nuclear consensus allowed some flexibility to the nuclear operators as residual electricity production could be transformed from one unit to another to optimize the use of installed fuel assemblies.…”