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Effective governance is crucial for developing various renewable energies, especially in their early stages. After the spectacular growth of onshore wind in the past decade, offshore wind is attracting an increasing amount of attention globally. As an archipelago and facing electricity shortage after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan has been accelerating its pace of developing offshore wind. However, the Japanese government encounters the challenge of adapting its old institution to the new governance demand. This research analyzes the evolution of offshore wind policies and evaluates the progress of inter-ministerial collaboration in Japan. It is found that from the initial potential surveys to the final setting of offshore wind feed-in tariff, the relations between relevant agencies were more characterized by inter-ministerial competitions than collaborations. The deeply rooted traditional sectionalism continues to affect the development of offshore wind and may slow down the progress of energy transition in Japan.

Black carbon mitigation has received increasing attention for its potential contribution to both climate change mitigation and air pollution control. Although different bottom-up models concerned with unit mitigation costs of various technologies allow the assessment of alternative policies for optimized cost-effectiveness, the lack of adequate data often forced many reluctant explicit and implicit assumptions that deviate away from actual situations of rural residential energy consumption in developing countries, where most black carbon emissions occur. To gauge the theory-practice gap in black carbon mitigation – the unit cost differences that lie between what is estimated in the theory and what is practically achieved on the ground – this study conducted an extensive field survey and analysis of nine mitigation technologies in rural China, covering both northern and southern regions with different residential energy consumption patterns. With a special focus on two temporal characteristics of those technologies – lifetimes and annual utilization rates, this study quantitatively measured the unit cost gaps and explain the technical as well as sociopolitical mechanisms behind. Structural and behavioral barriers, which have affected the technologies’ performance, are discussed together with policy implications to narrow those gaps.

Previous studies on the science–policy interface concentrate mostly on institutional arrangements that facilitate the information exchange between scientists and policymakers, but few address the internal structure of the scientist community and its impact on policy-making. Considering that science emerges from academic competition, the examination of the power balance within the scientist community is crucial for understanding political outcomes in the science–policy interface. This study applies social network analysis to the scientist community of grassland management in China and demonstrates that the structure of the scientist community exerts a significant influence on the formation of environmental policies. The dominance of ecologists inside the community led to the prevalence of the overgrazing-causes-degradation narrative. Though anthropologists later questioned the narrative, their capacity to challenge the authority of ecologists was circumscribed by their small group size, weak intra-group connection, and limited political affiliation. This resulted in the persistence of biased policies that continue to blame local communities for environmental problems.

Due to significant cost advantages, wind energy penetrated the energy mix of most large countries much faster than solar PV did until the recent decade. However, Japan has been almost one-sidedly leaning toward the more expensive solar PV. For using solar PV electricity, the Japanese consumers are also paying sizably higher tariffs than those in other countries, especially after the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 that led to the sudden suspension of all nuclear power plants. Japan's energy transition towards renewables is accordingly largely single legged, rather than more balanced to take advantage of both wind turbines and solar PV. This article explains the puzzle on why renewable energy development in Japan has created such a wide distance from more economically optimal situations. We focus on the initiation, formation and impacts of the solar lobby that comprises bureaucracies, politicians, solar PV manufacturers, and independent power producers. Policy implications are drawn for Japan and other countries on the importance of controlling political lobby to achieve less costly energy transition.