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To tackle transboundary air pollution in East Asia, international schemes for environmental cooperation have been introduced, including the Acid Deposition Monitoring Network in East Asia (EANET), Long‐Range Transboundary Pollution of China, Japan and Korea (LTP), and the North‐East Asian Subregional Programme for Environmental Cooperation (NEASPEC). These programs, however, have not been successful in establishing robust regimes for effectively reducing transboundary air pollution in the region. This paper aims to examine the process of forming epistemic communities through these programs in East Asia. A bibliometric data on the scientific articles and reports produced were analyzed to examine the network structure of the scientific activities through EANET. The fragmentation of expert groups within EANET and among the major international schemes on air pollution in East Asia contributed to discouraging solid formation of an epistemic community covering air pollution comprehensively in the region. That makes it difficult to reach a consensus based on the current state of scientific knowledge on air pollution for providing effective advice and recommendations for the development of policies and regulations.

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.

Behind the Chinese government’s ambition to increase its forest cover to 15 % by 2050 is the large-scale tree plantation that continues to threaten millions of hectares of grasslands in China’s arid and semiarid regions. Though the negative environmental impacts of this tree plantation in arid and semiarid regions have been identified by some studies, there has been little sign of policy change. In order to understand why, we must be aware of the political processes that have sustained China’s tree-centered conservation approach for the past decades, but these processes have been largely left unexamined in existing scholarly literature. This study examines these processes by identifying the interest groups involved in environmental conservation, and the ways they leverage scientific knowledge for specific political objectives. This study argues that improved scientific understanding of natural systems will be insufficient to bring about positive environmental changes unless institutional balance is adjusted correspondingly.

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.