Contradictions in Pursuing Independence and Legitimacy Under Pressure

This paper explores a regulatory agency’s struggle for independence and legitimacy amidst considerable pressure from the government and civil society. Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) was created in 2012 in order to regain public trust in the nuclear safety administration. Since then, the pro-nuclear government has pursued nuclear restarts despite their unpopularity with the wider public and pressured the nuclear safety regulator to water down newly introduced safety standards. Meanwhile, citizen groups challenged the safety regulator’s legitimacy on the grounds of its decision making procedure and its regulatory performance. How has Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) responded to the dual challenge? The paper highlights contradictions between the NRA’s mission to avoid capture and its pursuit of legitimacy. Methodologically, the research used process tracing based on a range of primary and secondary sources and extensive interviews in both Japanese and English. Nuclear safety agencies tend to be less independent and less powerful than their counterparts in other sectors (Jordana et al. 2018). Defending its independence and regulatory powers against pressure from the government presented a considerable challenge for the newly established NRA. It was able to do so by proactively pursuing transparent decision making, bolstering nuclear safety standards, omitting contested scientific findings, and inviting scrutiny by the Japanese public and the IAEA. While IAEA review missions have somewhat strengthened the NRA’s legitimacy as a regulatory agency, other strategies — transparency, scientific conservativeness, and new regulations — have had an adverse effect. In response to transparency about residual risks of nuclear power without participatory governance, there were widespread demands for hearings by local residents. New regulation expanded the emergency evacuation zones, resulting in more local citizen protests over what became seen as events taking place in their own neighbourhood. Cautious NRA decisions due to scientific conservativeness regarding earthquake and volcano risks galvanised an unprecedented wave of legal action against regulatory decisions to deem a nuclear reactor safe. This paper concludes that Japan’s nuclear safety regulator achieved political independence, but failed to regain trust and attain legitimacy because the same strategies that enabled the former have galvanised citizen voices questioning the legitimacy of nuclear safety regulation. The findings are relevant for those studying independent regulatory agencies as a form of “credible commitment” (Gilardi, 2008), whether in nuclear safety or other existential environmental risks, as political independence, and particularly full transparency and disclosure, can intensify the policy conflict instead as citizens become fully aware of the scope of a problem. Gilardi, Fabrizio (2008): Delegation in the Regulatory State: Independent Regulatory Agenies in Western Europe. Cheltenhan, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing; Edward Elgar. Jordana, Jacint; Fernández-i-Marín, Xavier; Bianculli, Andrea C. (2018): Agency proliferation and the globalization of the regulatory state: Introducing a data set on the institutional features of regulatory agencies. In: Regulation & Governance, 12: 4, pp. 524-540.