Adaptive Policies and Measuring Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation into Institutional Processes: Some Experiences from Japan

Most of the current institutional systems and policy processes have been evolved mainly to deal with ‘known problems with known solutions’, and are often characterized with rigidity in structure, administrative procedures, and decision making mechanisms. Experience suggests that such institutional and policy processes have been ineffective to deal with issues that often change over the time and where decision making has to happen in a dynamic environment with considerable uncertainty. Climate change is one such issue where new information for decision making by policy makers continues to emerge while still the decisions cannot be postponed until such time reliable information is available for initiating actions.

The uncertain nature of climate change doesn’t mean that status quo is a better alternative. Several contemporary research that emanates from the understanding of social, policy dynamics and change management research indicate that there are ways to deal with unknown and ever changing challenges by designing institutional systems and decision making mechanisms in a flexible/adaptive manner. This body of literature seems to support the hypothesis that systems that are designed flexible or adaptive can evolve better with the changing status of the issues that these systems are designed to address and hence are better able to solve them. In order to design such institutional and decision making systems, it is important to know the determinants or underlying factors that either contributes to or limits the adaptive nature of institutions and policies.

Another closely related aspect that has implications for better decision making for dealing with climate change is to know to what extent the institutions have mainstreamed climate change considerations into their administrative, decision making and business processes. If there is a possibility to rate institutions on a scale of no-mainstreaming to fully mainstreamed, it can provide an easy tool for decision makers to monitor the progression towards an ideal state of mainstreaming.

Keeping the above in view, the current expert consultation is aimed to answer the following questions: A) How various institutions and policies have responded to dynamic policy questions in the field of agriculture, food and natural resource management in Japan? B) What were the enabling and limiting factors for these institutions, policy processes, and policies to be adaptive or non-adaptive? C) Is it possible to measure the process of institutional mainstreaming on a scale between not-mainstreamed to fully mainstreamed? D) What is the current status of mainstreaming climate change adaptation considerations into the business processes of various institutions in Japan? E) What lessons these experiences can provide to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region?

To answer the above questions, the consultation is divided into two sessions. In the first session, various experts will talk about how various agricultural policies have evolved over the past few decades in Japan along with the evolving issues and provide an analysis on various enabling factors for these policies to be dynamic in nature. In the second session, various representatives from government ministries, private agencies, NGOs and donor agencies will provide an assessment of how they evaluate their institutional processes on the provided mainstreaming scale with supportive arguments on factors contributing to better or lack of progress in mainstreaming adaptation concerns.

This consultation meeting is funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) through the project CRP2009-02NMY-Pereira.