Climate Change Policy Network and Policy Cleavage Structure: India and Japan Comparison

Although global progress in mitigating dangerous levels of climate change failing so far, positive signs are visible among many developing countries over the last decade in terms of attitudes toward climate policies. Country such as India and China are rapidly expanding renewable energies and actively advocating their leadership role in the global effort for tackling the climate crisis, which shows a strong contrast to the traditional picture that these countries reacted the climate negotiation in a reactive and defensive manner. By contrast, developed countries are facing difficulties in making further progress in energy transition. What is driving this shift of attitude towards climate policy? Among numerous relevant factors, this paper tries to address this question from the perspective of domestic policymaking. Most previous studies focused on the domestic climate policy domains have focused solely on a single country case or compared developed countries. Accordingly, it is still not clear why some key developed and developing countries are taking different paths in recent years regarding climate and energy policy. To investigate this gap in knowledge, we compare two key countries, India and Japan, as cases that crystalize the features of the aforementioned new trend. By combining the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) with the technique of social network analysis (SNA) on multiplex networks, we systematically compare the constellation of stakeholders and patterns of collaboration around issues in India and Japan based on our original survey to the main organizations for domestic climate policy making in both countries. Findings show that the Japanese climate change policy domain is very conflictual, because every advocacy coalition takes conflicting positions on almost every issue. By contrast, the Indian policy domain is less so. Moreover, opportunities for profitability through the energy transition is still in dispute among Japanese stakeholders, in contrast it is taken for granted among Indian counterparts. We interpret these different constellations are caused by the differing national circumstances and contexts: actors in the developed countries in which energy supply is already established view the climate policy as zero-sum game, while actors in developed countries perceive the same issue as non-zero-sum game.