Introduction

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. It also shows how stakeholders’ kinds of expertise, in a historical context, help to bridge expert and citizen legitimacy, as well as spatial and jurisdictional governance structures across scales of socio-political governance.

Design and Management of Governance Methods

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.

Contextual Relevance

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.