| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,300,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Since the enactment of the NPO Act in 1998 in Japan, numbers of Japan's small-scaled environmental movement organizations, most of which have resigned themselves small voluntary groups, started to organize themselves as formal non-profit organizations. Thus, the legal basis for institutionalization and formalization of environmental groups as non-profit organizations, enabling them to influence decision-making processes, was belatedly established in Japan. This study aims to examine qualitatively how and to what extent the formalization and institutionalization of environmental movement organizations facilitated their actions to advocate environmental policy making and to enhance public opinion.
In-depth interviews to relatively formalized and institutionalized advocacy environmental non-profit organizations gave us following findings :
Environmental NPOs are classified into three major categories ; a)those which were established as Japan's chapters of the foreign based established envir
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onmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and WWF ; b)those which have been in action for decades in Japan as grass-roots organizations or consumer organizations and which, after the enactment of the NPO Act, organized themselves as formal NPOs ; c)those launched relatively recently as environmental NPOs from the begging.
Lacking tax exemption or tax deduction on donation to NPOs, Japan's environmental NPOs, by and large, have had insufficient financial infrastructure, which, in turn, resulted in insufficient expertise and human power necessary for advocacy and political influence. In spite of these disadvantages, formalization and institutionalization of NPOs in Japan obviously promoted partnership between NPOs and local governments or business sector. Environmental NPOs started seeking their own Niches, developing their own unique non-profit business opportunities and activities. To give some example, Japanese chapters of foreign based well-established environmental groups and newly developed groups tend to address the international causes in the arena such as United Nation committees, while grass-roots based local NPOs tend to propose environmental policies in local communities. Less
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