Knowledge regimes in post-developmental states: assessing the role of think tanks in Japan's policymaking process

In: Pacific affairs: an international review of Asia and the Pacific, Band 91, Heft 1, S. 95-118

Abstract

Tracing the mechanisms of policy change, recent studies of knowledge regimes in Western democracies have examined the reciprocal relationship between a state's institutional features and the role of think tanks in the production and dissemination of policy ideas. This paper expands the focus to East Asia and examines the role of think tanks in Japan. With a strong bureaucracy functioning as the primary repository for policy expertise, Japan's developmental state has long been discouraging the creation of independent think tanks. Yet, Japan's bureaucratic and electoral reforms in the 1990s have opened new access points to the policy process, encouraging the growth of new think tanks in addition to Japan's semi-governmental and corporate research organizations. By looking at the Abe government's national security discourse and Japan's debate on participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement during the period 2012 to 2015, this article assesses the role of external policy advice in Japan's post-developmental state. The study illustrates the link between Japan's changing political system, the changing nature of its knowledge regime, and the structural conditions under which think tanks yield influence in Japan. By doing so, this article offers evidence of an increasingly competitive think-tank landscape structured along the conservative and progressive political spectrum of policy ideas, and unpacks the strategies by which think tanks penetrate Japan's policymaking process. However, despite the enhanced role of think tanks, the findings also point to the sustained prominence of individual intellectuals and academics in advising Japan's decision makers. (Pac Aff/GIGA)