The actual implications of practices which can be described as environmental governance can only be understood if investigated from a “does governance affect government, and how?” perspective. Based on a case study of the Water Catchment Forest Council in Kanagawa Prefecture, we showed what would be required in order for an organization established for environmental governance to affect the environmental policies of the regional government. It is essential, we concluded, to enhance the autonomy of the organization, to sustain the organization’s own mission, and to have a mechanism for involving people and groups peripheral to the organization.

In this paper, we analyze the feasibility of an economic incentive policy designed to enhance forest owners’ willingness to conserve forests independently by paying compensation for forest conservation as an incentive for forest conservation, in order to reduce CO₂ emissions from deforestation caused by the liberalization of trade in forest products. The analysis shows that the economic incentive policy is a more cost-effective method than certain other methods for reducing atmospheric CO₂. The economic incentive policy also has the following advantages: not incurring the sort of monitoring costs associated with direct regulation for forest conservation, not squeezing forest owners’ incomes, and enabling the countries subject to distribution of forest conservation incentives to be specified. Consequently, the policy appears to have high feasibility.

This paper’s purpose is to reveal how much damage due to noise pollution by military aircraft the people around Yokota Air Base have incurred under the national security arrangements between the U. S. and Japan. To reveal this fact we use the social cost concept. In this paper we describe the situation with regard to noise pollution damage, set out the issues addressed in lawsuits for damages, and estimate the social cost. Consequently it is revealed that through old and new lawsuits concerning common damage from May 1973 to November 2004, plaintiffs were compensated for only 2.4% of the full amount of damage incurred. That is to say, the people around Yokota Air Base incurred an unaccounted cost of about 206 billion yen.

Recently international efforts have led toward increasing trade openness. Also, reduced dependence on energy use can mitigate global warming and improve air quality by reducing pollutants such as sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide, and is an important item on the energy security agenda. This paper re-examines the effect of trade openness on energy use by a dynamic adjustment process and addresses the endogeneity problems. Trade is found to increase energy use in non-OECD countries in both the short and the long term. On the other hand, in OECD countries, while we find that trade decreases energy use in the short term, it increases energy use in the long term. Furthermore, our results imply that although

the short term effect is limited, the long term effect is highly significant.

Damage-based taxation is an effective policy tool in controlling nonpoint source poliution. In this paper we introduce a “peer pressure” environment in which agents can monitor and sanction each other for pollution abatement. Our purpose is to analyze optimal damage-based taxation and cooperative behavior among the agents in this environment. It is known in the literature that the optimal tax is to let agents fully compensate for the damage when there is no peer pressure. We observe that this is not the case in our peer pressure environment, where partial compensation is more socially desirable than full compensation. The presence of the peer pressure does not affect the incentives for cooperation, but it changes the level of effort put into abatement when cooperation occurs. This effort level depends on the situations of the agents before cooperation, thereby suggesting the importance of paying attention to such situations in determining the optimal tax.