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Promises Unfulfilled: Tashizengata Kawazukuri and Environment-Oriented River Basin Governance in Japan

Promises Unfulfilled: Tashizengata Kawazukuri and Environment-Oriented River Basin Governance in Japan

Volume 3 Number 2, Autumn 2012 pp. 83-107(25)
Research Article
2012/9/1
Chakraborty, Abhik
Japanese river basins underwent a massive amount of human intervention during the postwar economic growth years, often with negative environmental impacts. Efforts to ensure nature conservation and maintenance of natural river basin landscapes began to take root in the 1990s. In planning circles, a design and governance ethic that became popular at that point, known as Tashizengata Kawazukuri, stressed the need to conserve natural elements in river basins. However, even as this ethic called for minimal human intervention in river regimes, some of the most disputed dam projects have been completed in the past two decades, and others are in the planning stages. This implies that Tashizengata Kawazukuri has failed to deliver on its promise. This article claims that the reasons behind this failure can be traced to the very initial stages of the proposal, in the core concepts of environmental protection and development as understood by bureaucrats. Analyzing this idea as sketched by Seki Masakazu, a pioneering voice in the bureaucracy, the article concludes that there is an enormous gap between the rhetoric and the implementation of the ethic, rooted in the engineer's vision of 'constructing' basin landscapes, which has hindered a full-fledged restoration ethic from developing in Japanese basin governance.
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