Energy, Sustainability and Resource Management

A global decline in public trust has created a strong need for governments worldwide to engage citizens in order to enhance policy legitimacy and ensure effective post-Fukushima energy transitions. Deliberative policy-making – an advanced form of participatory policy-making that emphasises dialogue and debate – is widely regarded as an intervention that can enhance trust and subsequently legitimacy of energy transitions policies. However, the potential and limits of deliberative policy-making remain the subject of debate. This paper contributes to this debate by exploring deliberative policy-making from a trust perspective. We develop a trust-based systems framework of deliberative policy-making in the energy transitions context to understand, examine, and conceptualise the quality of such policy-making processes. Our framework is tested and applied to a case study of a national deliberative poll (DP) on energy held in Japan in 2012. This study draws on qualitative and quantitative data derived from the DP, in particular from a two-day deliberative forum involving 285 citizens. The findings indicate that the existence of a trust gap may jeopardise the quality of deliberative processes where citizen participation is considered as an input and enhanced policy legitimacy as an output of a policy-making system. We also show that the trust gap is a complicated concept consisting of three dimensions (trust in information, motives, and competence) and three types of directional dynamics (vertical, horizontal, and temporal). Our study identifies the context of public distrust as well as the broader political environment as two critical contextual conditions that may inhibit the closure of the trust gap. Our study contains rich insights on deliberative policy-making in the energy context, arguing that it carries no guarantee of enhanced policy legitimacy. Policy-makers in the energy transitions field need to focus attention on creating the conditions to build public trust in order to enhance policy legitimacy and thus realise the potential benefits of deliberative practices of policy-making.

Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) has become an important source of social injustice in China. Taking clues from the theory of just transition and a case study of forestry reform in Northeast China, this article discusses the tension between environmental protection and social justice in Chinese AE. From a procedural perspective, the belief in insulated eco-elites being best placed to make environmental decisions, and the emphasis on policy expediency, are manifested in the top-down imposition of a sweeping ban on logging of natural forests. However, this non-participatory approach prevents critical and nuanced viewpoints on local impacts to be recognized and addressed. From a distributional perspective, while AE does not inherently contradict the norm of distributive justice, the forestry reform has negatively affected the undercompensated and under-supported laid off workers, created new energy poverty issues, undermined local public services, and disproportionately affected smaller, remote communities, some of whom have been outright abandoned. The findings highlight the need for scholars to engage with social justice issues in AE by championing the importance of a just transition process, experimenting with public engagement in the context of authoritarianism, and generating policy knowledge that facilitates the transformation toward sustainability.