The term “green recovery” (German: Grüner Wiederaufbau) describes a two-fold strategy of ecological, economical and social recovery from the double crises of climate change and the COVID pandemic, on the one hand, and the implementation of structural changes to advance a green economic agenda and a social and ecological turnover, on the other. It is a process that aims for a transition to a sustainable, climate neutral and resilient economy and society. Public Dolling indicates that the support for such policies to counter climate change remains high. For instance, the Fridays for Future movement continues to exert strong influence, and in response to a complaint by Sophie Backsen and other young activists, the Federal Constitutional Court in April 2021 issued a verdict that the Climate Change Act of 2019 is partially unconstitutional in regards to assuring intergenerational fairness. To this, the government of Chancellor Merkel has quickly reacted and approved of amendments to the law. The Green Recovery is thus anchored in Germany’s climate protection policies of ending nuclear energy, transition to renewable energies, and changes in traffic, transport and in the agricultural sector. Under the German Presidency of the EU Council in the second half of 2020, Merkel further advanced the European Green Deal (a set of policies initiated by the European Commission in 2019) to include a COVID recovery fund and the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF, 2021-27). In addition, the German federal government has decided on a spending program of 130 billion Euros for crisis recovery and future investment (includine international efforts) for 2020-21. Energy change is a project that requires the participation of the citizens and that enjoys vast support in the population. However, since energy change means not only the restructuring of the energy sector but also involves traffic, architecture, business and work environments, and reaches down to many aspects of one’s personal life, the various policies in different areas need to be coordinated in order to ascertain longterm sustainability.

The UK has been fighting against the triple impact: climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit, all of which are shaking the country’s socieconomic fabric. As a means of coping with and recovering from these impacts, Prime Minister Johnson has set the idea of green recovery at the heart of national policy, and in his ‘Ten Point Plans’, published in November 2020, set out a strategy for social and economic recovery through a “Green Industrial Revolution”.

In recent years, the UK has made a series of radical moves in this area, including making renewable energy (especially offshore wind power) the main source of electric power (47% of the power mix), bringing forward the ban on the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles to 2030, and legislating for a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target for 2050.

This paper looks at the UK’s climate change policy since the Climate Change Act, and examines how the Green Industrial Revolution is aiming for a socio economic recovery by 1) looking at how green recovery is interpreted and how it is being translated into policy, and 2) identifying the roles of three actors that put government strategy into practice on the ground: local governments, businesses, and the civil society organisations. In conclusion, the paper points out while the government succeeds in presenting a clear vision of economic recovery through the embodiment of climate change measures and the development of related industries, a series of challenges still remains, such as addressing the broader social and political dimensions of decarbonisation in future policies and strategies, and working with local authorities and civil society organisations in policy implementation.

On September 22, 2020, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, at the general debate of the 75th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, made a statement with the commitment that China “aims to have CO₂ emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060”. On December 12 of the same year, at the Climate Ambition Summit, President Xi announced further commitments for 2030 (2030 tareet) that are to “lower the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by over 65 percent from the 2005 level; to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 25 percent; and, to bring its total installed capacity of wind and solar power to over 1.2 billion kilowatts”. The Chinese government abbreviates above 2030 and 2060 targets as the “3060 targets” and has been applying domestic policies accordingly. The purpose of this paper is to clarify: 1) The background of the development of the decarbonization strategy with the 3060 targets; 2) Its strategic thinking; and, 3) The challenges as well for achieving the 2060 carbon neutrality.

As green recovery policy the governments try to expand their public expenditures for gaining both economic recovery and decarbonization simultaneously. This article identifies clear tendency for “greening fiscal policy” in the United States and EU on one hand, and a solid tendency for “fiscal expansion without greening” in Japan on the other hand. This difference can be explained by the Japanese still maintained view that economic growth and decarbonization are in a trade-off relationship. This leads to its policy characteristics that try to keep emission abatement costs of industrial sector as low as possible by allocating only minor emissions reduction responsibilities to industrial sector.

This policy may rescue industrial sector in a short term, but led to very slow industrial structural change, low economic growth rate, and stagnated GHG emission reduction. It is very contrasting with many other countries that improved “carbon productivity (GDP/CO₂ emission) ” by realizing “decoupling (separating economic growth from GHG emission increase) ”. This article clarifies that the　recent Japanese climate change policy released after the Japanese Government’s declaration for carbon neutrality by 2050 is also not escaping from this deficiency.

This article finally introduces author’s research result drawn from a simulation based on macroeconometric model concerning economic impact of carbon neutrality policy on the Japanese economy. This research is based on a policy scenario that attain carbon neutrality bv 2050 by introducing carbon pricing and reinvesting its revenue in decarbonization. Its message is very clear; carbon neutral policy brings about faster economic growth. The Japanese climate change policy needs policy innovation like this.

Climate change is a global security issue that, by its very nature, poses a longer-term crisis situation. This has led countries to make commitments such as “carbon neutrality in 2050”. However, even if countries realize their current commitments in 2030, it will be extremely difficult to realize the overall goal adopted in the Paris Agreement.

The link between refugee issues and climate change will also become increasingly important. The latest IPCC report also indicates that extreme weather events will increase, which means that extreme weather events will generate a large number of refugees.

On top of that, the issue of equity still exists in the climate change issue, especially in its measures, between developed and developing countries with different per capita and historical emissions. The issue of financial assistance. which also has the aspect of compensation for damage, is also involved.

In the coming international negotiations, if the U.S. is able to introduce regulations that will enable it to achieve zero emissions in the electricity sector by 2035, it is possible that China will raise its target while keeping an eye on othercountries. However, this would also require developed countries to make further commitments, including the implementation of specific policies and financial support for developing countries.

There is also a fundamental problem with international negotiations under the UNFCCC. That is the unanimity approach. However, even with such problems, the reality is that it is difficult to build an international framework that can replace the UNFCCC in terms of democracy in the policy-making process.

We sometimes find strange but essential facts that some international institutions, with their elapsed time, do not fully function in the international crisis. I explain why institutions including international organizations and agreements cannot quickly and comprehensively respond the huge crisis. In addition, I analyze why the powers (participating states) do not expect that institutions will act in accordance with the changing national interests, causing the deterioration and hardening of institutions. In history of ten decades, inter-war period in the 1920s produced the many institutions like disarmament treaties, detente period in the 1970s enflowered arms talks and the CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, later OSCE), and inter-cold war period in the 1990s promoted lots of international regimes like Kyoto Protocol, CTBT(not coming into effect yet), and NPT's unlimited extension. These produced institutions later faced crisis between the powers, and many of them could not respond to the solution of the crisis, because of deterioration and hardening of the institutions. In order to explain these phenomena, I show typical examples of the CSCE/OSCE regimes in the several crises. At second, I explain a case of the 1.5 track of Ulaanbaatar Dialogue (UBD) for the dialogue of security issues and crisis in the North East Asia region. In my paper, I use institutional analysis and focus on relationship between institutions and powers in the perspective of risks and in the situation of crisis.

To discuss on the global risk concerning artificial intelligence (AI), start from investigating the current condition in which AI technology was already immersed both into our daily life and the governance of the whole society or democracy. Since the 3rd AI boom, the rapid technological development in the recent years, has been largely supported by the measure so-called “deep learning”, its character and influence toward making the whole AI systems into “black box” is examined, to describe the common images of AI-related risk and the crises brought from AI. Then the fact that such risk scenarios are not much accepted as realistic, though, because of the equivocality of AI and its current (and in the possible future’s) development. Also, the trend in which what we have been expected to AI, and to us the human beings in return, has largely transformed is described. Finally, the author points out that the technological development in itself shall be understood as our action based on the social / democratic choices, and thus have certain tendencies, to which we can possibly design social and legal, not technological, countermeasures.

In the past two decades, a growing number of philosophers as well as natural and social scientists have studied issues surrounding the idea of existential risk, which refers to a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity’s potential for development by annihilating the human race or in any other ways. Existential risks fall into two broad categories: the first is a set of natural risks ranging from supervolcanoes to asteroids and comets; the second is a group of various anthropogenic risks including nuclear weapons, climate change, misused biotechnology and nanotechnology, lethal autonomous weapon systems, and unaligned artificial superinteligence. Considering that if these hazards are successfully avoided, humanity will expectedly flourish for hundreds of million years, an attempt to eliminate the hazards holds tremendous value. As the well-functioning system of public policy is essential in effectively decreasing existential risks, the risks deserve careful scrutiny in policy analysis. Nonetheless, few studies on risks of this kind have been made by Japanese policy researchers. The current paper aims to fill this large gap in the literature by addressing questions of existential risks from the viewpoint of policy analysis.

This paper begins by noting that it has enormous value to even slightly reduce the probability of an existential catastrophe and then sets forth the purpose of discussing policy analytic issues raised by existential risks. Next, definitions of existential risk provided by leading theorists are examined, and a new definition is proposed. We also assess a system of risk classes proposed in the literature, under one of which existential hazards come, and offer an alternative system. Then, possible catastrophes in three categories are briefly reviewed: natural risks, risks posed by existing technologies, and risks predictably entailed by near-future technologies. Utilizing theoretical and empirical observations made so far in the study of existential hazards, we discuss three topics in policy study: the impossibility of policy feedback, doubtful relevance of social discount rate, and usefulness of inverse cost benefit analysis. The paper concludes with the emphasis on need for further policy analytic studies on existential risks.

The traditional model in regulatory enforcement strategies (the enforcement action model) has taught that different types of violators require different responses from the administration, especially from front-line workers. However, this model does not always capture well the “interaction” between the administration and the regulatee in the enforcement process. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to reformulate the enforcement action model using game theory, which is strong in analyzing interactions. Through the analysis of the multiple models, the “regulatory game” and the “bargaining game”, we found that the structure of the interaction :(1) it is impossible to discourage the “opportunist” from committing non-compliance while responding to the “incompetent” with guidance (familiarization strateey), (2) in order to stave off the neglect of non-compliance by “overly passive” administrations, it is effective to reduce the payoff that administrations gain when they neglect non-compliance, and (3) the effectiveness of the “adaptive strategy” against “objector” depends on the evaluation of the administration and the regulatee to the administrative litigation as a point of disagreement in the bargaining and on the patience of the administration in protracted bargaining. In addition, by clarifying the mechanisms that lead from assumptions to conclusions, we present hypotheses about regulatory policy and contribute to the further development of research in the future.

In order to lead policy formulation, modern chief executives often centralize the policy formulation process in the bureaucracy. This paper asks the remaining questions in previous studies on centralization: (1) to what extent do the chief executives centralize/decentralize depending on the size of their pre-electoral coalitions, and (2) how does centralization by the chief executives affect their legislative success. To address these questions, this paper selects Japanese local governments from 1991 to 2014 as a case. Studies on local governments in Japan have not yet answered these questions. Based on rational choice theory and quantitative analysis by the dataset on the bureaucratic organization of local governments created by the author, this paper reveals the following. First, the smaller the governors’ pre-electoral coalitions are, the more they centralize the policy formulation process. Second, the more governors centralize, the more their bills are amended or rejected. These results together suggest that the governors indirectly exert their influence on the assembly members by changing the extent of centralization as a reelection strategy according to the size of their pre-electoral coalitions. In other words, the policy formulation process is used by the governors as a political means of buildine a relationship with the assembly members, and the assembly members decide whether to accept the governors’ bills while considering not only their policy substance but also the extent of centralization.