The Day Autonomy Moved -- The Challenge of Industrial Waste Cooperation Beginning in the Town of Mitake, Gifu (December 2000)

The Day Autonomy Moved -- The Challenge of Industrial Waste Cooperation Beginning in the Town of Mitake, Gifu (December 2000)

In 2000, Japan was at a "critical point in waste disposal. About 10 years after the collapse of the bubble economy, the amount of construction debris and industrial waste continued to increase sharply, while the tightness of final disposal sites and the increase in illegal dumping became serious social problems. Conflicts with local residents over the construction of disposal sites erupted in many local governments, and the number of such conflicts was reported to have reached more than 500 sites nationwide.

Particularly complicating the problem was a structural flaw in the former Waste Disposal and Public Cleansing Law, which was developed in the 1970s. Under this law, the siting restrictions on industrial waste disposal sites were very loose, and the majority of licensing authority was concentrated in the prefectural governments. On the other hand, the people most affected by the construction and operation of a repository are the residents of the municipality in which the repository is to be built. Nevertheless, these municipalities had neither the right to veto nor the legal obligation to hold prior consultations. Thus, many local governments were caught between the residents and the contractors, and suffered from a "blind spot in the system.

The town of Mitake in Kani-gun, Gifu Prefecture, was the first to address this contradiction. In 1995, a plan to build an industrial waste treatment facility was proposed in the town, and a large scale local residents' movement was launched. The town took the residents' side and prevented the development through its own ordinance. The town's stance became known throughout Japan as a "model of rivalry between residents and self-governance.

Based on this experience, the town of Mitake established the "National Liaison Association of Municipalities with Industrial Waste Problems" in 2000. The association was the first institutionalized network in Japan to connect municipalities facing industrial waste problems. The town of Mitake served as its secretariat, providing a forum for the exchange of information and policy recommendations on a nationwide scale.

This move was more than just filling a hole in the system. It was an expression of practical autonomy against the centralized environmental administration, saying, "The law is moved by action in the field. Municipalities, which had been treated as voices outside of the system and without a voice, used their own experience as a weapon to push the national government to reform the system. This was a symbolic scene of the "proximity between the environment and self-governance" that began in the early 2000s.

At this time, environmental policies were beginning to be shaped not by administrative guidance from above, but by voices from the bottom up. While the Dioxin Control Law, the Basic Law for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society, and the Home Appliance Recycling Law were enacted one after another, they were supported by the practical, bottom-up efforts of residents and local governments. The birth of the "National Liaison Conference of Municipalities on Industrial Waste Disposal Issues" was symbolic of this, and would have a profound impact on the later development of decentralization and environmental governance.

This small gesture by a small municipality, the town of Mitake, created a quiet but definite ripple effect on the system's surface. This was the moment when municipalities began to change from being "managed" to "policy makers. It was a moment when municipalities began to transform themselves from "entities to be managed" into "policy makers.