Divided we Work, Together we Argue: Explaining the Differences in Consensual Logic of the German and Japanese Climate Change Policy Networks

Empirically, Germany has managed relatively well to account for challenges posed by climate change and was long seen as a forerunner for climate change policies, with a main focus on the support of renewable energies. On the contrary, Japan’s climate change policies were rather conservative and focused on energy saving and nuclear energy. We compare the climate change policy networks of Germany and Japan in our Paper. We argue that easy accessible and dense policy networks gave rise to a comparatively successful development of climate change policies in Germany. In comparison, the sparse, more polarized and less consensual Japanese policy network accounts for a slower process of policy development. More specific, we contrast two different network relations for Japan and Germany, the exchange of scientific information and the exchange of ideas. We argue that whereas the exchange of information is very much driven by the underlying ideology, i.e. how organizations perceive the reality of climate change, broad and diverse participation in the exchange of ideas is a precondition for a consensual style of policy making in which the multiple blocks that exchange information locally participate in a common discourse. We substantiate our claim with a novel network data set which comprises high quality attribute and network information for 51 crucial organizations in the German and 72 crucial organizations in the Japanese climate change policy network. We analyze the concrete structure of the networks with exponential random graph models.