Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority – an unexpected independent regulatory agency

The proliferation of regulatory agencies has attracted scholarly interest in determinants of political independence. Nuclear safety agencies tend to be less independent and less powerful than their counterparts in other sectors (Jordana et al 2018). Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan has seen the emergence of an independent nuclear safety agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) in 2012. What allowed the NRA to defy pressure from pro-nuclear actors and to act independently? The paper highlights independence from the bureaucracy and in-house expertise as important factors. Methodologically, the research used process tracing based on a range of primary and secondary sources and interviews in both Japanese and English. Independence assessments usually focus on relations vis-à-vis politicians and regulates with de jure independence containing four dimensions: Regulatory capabilities, managerial autonomy, political independence, and public accountability (Jordana et al 2018). The analysis of the NRA shows that Japan’s new safety regulator scores rather high in each of the four dimensions. Furthermore, they achieved de facto independence from regulatees by building up in-house expertise, but also from the remainder of the bureaucracy. The latter was a crucial step considering the strength of the Japanese bureaucracy. These results contribute two things to the existing literature. One, adding de facto independence from the bureaucracy to analysis of day to day autonomy, it enables the concept to travel more easily to countries with a strong and influential bureaucracy. Two, in line with the old proverb “knowledge is power”, it suggests that knowledge-related indicators are important and should be considered more when assessing de jure autonomy. 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.