Adaptive Participatory Environmental Governance in Japan [electronic resource] : Local Experiences, Global Lessons / edited by Taisuke Miyauchi, Mayumi Fukunaga.

Chapter 1.Introduction: : Legitimacy, Adaptability and Narrative-based Design -- Chapter 2. Reeds and Rights: Dynamism of Legitimacy Construction in the Management of Collective Natural Resources -- Chapter 3. Forests to Revitalize Local Society; Adaptive Contribution Projects for Legitimacy by Mountain Bikers -- Chapter 4. Creating space for creativity: Agricultural canals and an endangered species -- Chapter 5. The Satoyama Movement and its Adaptability: Beyond Ideology and Institutionalization -- Chapter 6. Re-contextualizing Wildlife Management to Community Revitalization -- Chapter 7. Listening to Nori Seaweed to Learn How to Better Live with the Sea for Urban Fishers: The Importance of Ecological Reflexivity for Environmental Governance -- Chapter 8. Complex Ties: Governance for Supporting Nuclear Evacuees -- Chapter 9. Resilience and invisible damage: The 2011 nuclear accident and natural resources management. Chapter 10. BThe Governance of Renewable Energy Projects and Expanded Distributive Justice -- Chapter 11. Trial of Tools to Evaluate Adaptive Processes in Environmental Activities -- Chapter 12. Narratives for Actualizing Local Knowledge to Empower Participatory Biosphere Reserve governance -- Chapter 13. Narratives Crossing Jurisdictions; Watershed-scale Collaborations for Adaptive Decisions and Actions -- Chapter 14. Science To Govern Urban Heat Risk In Fukuoka City, Japan: What Can A Historical Perspective Teach Us? -- Chapter 15. Action Research within Multi-layered Hegemonic Structure: 'Workshop' for Adaptive Governance -- Chapter 16. Empathy-based Assistance and its Transformative Role in the Adaptive Cycle of Collaborative Governance.

This book contributes to the theoretical and practitioner literature in environmental governance and sustainability of natural resources by linking case studies of the roles of narratives to the three key practices in local environmental governance: socio-political legitimacy in participation; collaboratively creating stakeholder-ness, and cultivating social and ecological capabilities. It provides numerous theoretical insights on legitimacy, adaptability, narratives, process-oriented collaborative planning, and among others, using in-depth case studies from historical and contemporary environmental issues including conservation, wildlife management, nuclear and tsunami disasters, and thus community risk, recovery, and resiliency.The authors are all practitioner-oriented scientists and scholars who are involved as local stakeholders in these practices. The chapters highlight their action and participatory-action research that adds deeper insights and analyses to successes, failures, and struggles in how narratives contribute to these three dimensions of effective environmental governance. Of particular interest, both within Japan and beyond, the book shares with readers how to design and manage practical governance methods with narratives. The detailed design methods include co-imagination of historical and current SESs, designing processes for collaborative productions of knowledge and perceptions, legitimacy and stakeholder-ness, contextualization of contested experiences among actors, and the creation of evaluation standards of what is effective and effective local environmental governance. The case studies and their findings reflect particular local contexts in Japan, but our experiences of multiple natural disasters, high economic growth and development, pollutions, the nuclear power plant accident, and rapidly aging society provide shared contexts of realities and provisional insights to other societies, especially to Asian societies.