I have been involved in several projects that are explicity involved in getting at the question of international and domestic linkages in environmental policy making in Japan and other states.

One study is a 40 plus team of international/interdisciplinary scholars that are analysing how 10 states, including Japan, have responded over time to the internationalization of the environment. Peter Haas is a member of this group focusing on the role of international institutions as conduits for information dissemination. The study has found that ideas about new problems (acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, global climate change) form and spread among a very small community of international scientists. Evidence of thinking about the idea of global warming by a few scientists, for instance, can be found in most states by the turn of the century. Even within the small specialized community of scientists thinking about this topic, however, the understanding of the problem has changed numerous times. It is often linked to other major concerns of the day-- like nuclear testing.

What is interesting is when and how ideas that are held by specialized communities make it onto domestic policy agendas. Interestingly, of the cases we have looked at, we found tremendous similarity in the timing of when issues got onto the "agenda." The media in different states all pick up on acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, global climate change within a very short time of each other. (Also interesting for this group, is that Japan is the state that is most consistently an abberation of this rule.)

There is a clear process of international dissemination of ideas about policy problems and some trigger that gets these issues into national policy debates at about the same time in states of very different political types and levels of economic development.

Once ideas are injected into national policy debates, however, there is also a clear process in which the interests of dominant domestic policy actors shape how issues are perceived. Thus, in Japan, acid rain has been linked to overseas development aid and the export of desulfurization technology to China.

The definition or understanding of problems like acid rain or stratospheric ozone depletion tend to vary enormously among states and this appears to have much to do with who the actors are that are linking their interests to the problem. The shape of domestic policy communities has a major impact on the way problems are perceived and the kinds of policy solutions that are pushed.

It should also be noted, however, that there is much evidence that the injection of major new ideas about problems into domestic policy debates-- problems of the scale of global climate change-- have the potential to alter the shape of domestic policy communities. In Japan and elsewhere, the shape of the environmental policy community has undergone major changes in response to the emergence of this new problem in the domestic policy debate. In particular, we see a real internationalization of the community. NGOs are no longer only domestically focused but have formed all kinds of international networks.
Japanese Dietmen have joined an international organization of parliamentarians concerned with coordinating governmental action of environmental issues. The Japanese Environment Agency works closely with the US EPA in an effort to enhance its information gathering potentials......

The problem with the two-level game approach is that it is static and does not build into it this element of institutional dynamism.

Miranda Schreurs
University of Maryland at College Park