LIST OF PANELS

One of the major objectives of this panel is to bring together scholars and practitioners from diverse public policy fields and countries to explore various policy and management issues in Japan from a comparative perspective. Facing depopulation, population structure change with super aging society, energy transitions after the Fukushima crisis and others, Japan is becoming a “leading-edge” field of various policy and management challenges.

As of 2017, more than 27% of whole populations in Japan are 65 years old and above, which is far ahead of any other country in the world. This places Japanese government under heavy policy and financial burden to cover the ever-increasing medical cost, pension, and nursing care and others, while its financial and administrative capacity has been shrinking due to a smaller number of working population. The other example of policy challenge facing Japan is the energy transitions after the Fukushima crisis in 2011. The Fukushima nuclear mishap jolted energy sector and public opinion to expedite the energy transitions to more renewable energy. Yet the technological advancement is still uncertain whether it can be a stable energy source. Japanese government is struggling between competing visions of energy transitions. These challenging policy and management issues are not necessary confined to one single country. But certainly Japan is at the forefront of facing these emerging issues that the rest of the world would face sooner or later. Exploring various policy and management issues in Japan has rich academic and practical insights for other countries and policy fields.

The panel aims to offer a valuable opportunity to discuss various policy and management issues in Japan from a comparative perspective. We welcome conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions about policy and managerial issues in Japan that focus on managerial, organizational, institutional, and specific policy level, as well as case studies with comparative perspective. This panel is hosted and organized by the Public Policy Studies Association Japan (PPSAJ).

The purpose of this panel is to explore various policy and management issues and challenges facing in Japan from a comparative perspective. The panel collects both theoretical and empirical papers exploring different policy and management challenges in Japan. The objective is to extract the rich academic and practical implications based on Japanese experiences from a comparative perspective.  

Questions the papers could address include, but are not limited to, for example:

(i) What are the impacts of socio-economic conditions on governance, policy and management issues, especially on the population and its structure?

(ii) How does institutional arrangement enable and constrain policy effectiveness or change?

(iii) How can government enhance policy performance under uncertainty and resource constrain?

(iv) How can government deal with policy and management issues that go beyond national boundaries?

Overall, by sharing answers to these questions based on Japanese experiences from different policy and management contexts, this panel will try to extract the practical lessons and academic implications on a broader governance and policy issues.