Local Environmental Administration and Local Businesses in Ishikawa Prefecture: An Attempt at Autonomy to Unite Knowledge in the Early 2000s

Local Environmental Administration and Local Businesses in Ishikawa Prefecture: An Attempt at Autonomy to Unite Knowledge in the Early 2000s
The comprehensive environmental ordinance (tentative name) being considered in Ishikawa Prefecture is symbolic of the trend in Japan's environmental administration in the early 2000s toward a shift from a centralized system to a regionally driven approach. However, the uniform national framework was not necessarily compatible with local industrial structures and technological accumulation, and local communities were conscious of institutional fatigue. Against this backdrop, Ishikawa Prefecture redefined the region's accumulated technology, human resources, and experience as core resources for environmental policy, based on the basic principle of knowledge management. The administration has shown itself to be not only a regulatory body but also a role editor that supports the development of environmental technologies by local companies and links industrial promotion, R&D, human resource development, and environmental conservation in a cross-sectional manner. This approach is o
riented toward the substantiation of autonomy that is not centrally dependent, and can be positioned as a regionally driven environmental policy model that precedes the later ideas of regional recycling symbiosis zones and local SDGs.