Although public participation at public hearings for river basin improvement planning has been introduced, participation is formal and it cannot be said that consensus building with residents is achieved. The objective of this study is to clarify the effect of speaker opinions at public hearings quantitatively focusing on the consensus building process. Changes in resident opinions due to make presentation to speaker opinions were measured and evaluated based on the results of a virtual public hearing using a gaming simulation.

Nagano city in Nagano prefecture, Japan, is an environmentally advanced municipality that terms itself an “environmentally harmony city”. We have studied the effects of social capital and environmental information on the level of the residents' perception of the impact of environmental programs in Nagano City through a survey (questionnaire).

The results show that, in the structural model, bonding social capital has a higher contribution to the level of perception of program impact, through the awareness level of program impact, than that of bridging social capital. And, though the Internet, regulated by bridging social capital, offers large amounts of information, only the city bulletin, regulated by bonding social capital, determines the level of perception of program impact. Bonding social capital is effective in raising the level of perception of program impact. Local computerization, through the application of ICT, is necessary for the formation of social capital and the improvement of the level of perception of program impact.

The Japanese government has been aggressively conducting local governmental consolidations since 1999. The objective is said to be fiscal efficiency of the local government. The effects generated by the consolidations, however, are not sufficiently confirmed. This paper, therefore, focuses on water supply services and then examines whether the consolidations have improved efficiency of the corresponding water supply services. Using Japanese local governmental data from 2004 to 2011, our econometric analysis found that the consolidations significantly resulted in technological efficiency gain by 1% in the water supply services. Additionally, based on the assumption of a linear relationship between efficiency and the rate of carbon dioxide （CO₂） emissions, we calculated emission reduction based on consolidations. As a result, a reduction of up to approximately 0.2 million tons of CO₂ emissions was achieved in the 8 years from 2004 to 2011. Therefore, it is concluded that consolidation generated the improvement of technological efficiency as well as emission reductions.