Unsettling mainstream academic debates on community-based energy governance: Exploring the Japanese experience

Community-based energy governance (CEG), in which citizens or communities play a central role, has attracted sufficient attention in the context of efforts to achieve a democratic and just energy transition. Despite this surge of interest, however, a crucial limitation of the CEG literature is that its conceptualisation relies mainly on the analyses of case studies and literature from North Western Europe. To address this geographic bias, this paper conducts a rigorous review of Japanese debates on CEG, shedding new light on how the first-hand experience of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011 has led to new dialogues, based on its domestic interdisciplinary traditions to tackle environmental pollution in Japan. The analysis shows that the challenges addressed by CEG can vary across geographical contexts. CEG in Japan has, first and foremost, been understood as an alternative to the “exogenous” or “colonial” regional development underlying the Japanese energy system. Here, community has been approached as a starting point to address the geographical economic disparity that exists in the existing energy system, by attaining “endogenous development” and “energy autonomy”. The analysis, therefore, provides an alternative perspective for the critical scrutiny of dominant approaches towards CEG in “Western” tradition, while pointing to the need for further in-depth inquiry into the articulation of CEG in Japan and beyond. • A review of Japanese debates on community-based energy governance is presented. • Japanese conceptualisations are different from mainstream debates. • Issues around nuclear power plants are recognised as a major challenge in Japan. • Unique conceptualisations towards alternative energy governance are highlighted.