Project Description

I focus on the interaction between the civil society organizations (CSOs) in Japan that are promoting peace, democracy, and environmental sustainability and the Japanese state to find out how these organizations have framed, articulated, and interpreted their goals for a nuclear-free policy and sustainable energy realities in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident (3/11).

The research questions are below:

• How have CSOs mobilized political institutions to further their goals toward a free-nuclear policy in Japan?
• What channels and resources do they use to create their political opening and engage or fail to engage the government?
• To what extent are they influential on the formulation and implementation of energy policies with regards to the outcomes of their actions?
• If to a small extent, what essential practices could be identified?

The leading CSOs that are chosen for this study are Peace Boat, Citizen Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), The Institute of Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP), and Peace Culture Foundation. Each organization mobilizes in various ways including disseminating their views in media, sharing research as well as findings, organizing events to raise public awareness, negotiating with policy makers, and creating an avenue for a peaceful dialogue. This study aims to play a reflective role on the nexus of energy politics, deliberative environmentalism, and collective behavior. These findings would provide an understanding of the challenges, opportunities, potential, and constraints that the CSOs have faced.

Bio

Ms. Pinar Temocin was trained in Philosophy in Turkey and Germany and Comparative Politics and Public Policy in France. She was a visiting research student at Seoul National University, and a graduate fellow of The Nuclear Nonproliferation Education Research Center, The Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea. She did research at The Peace Foundation, Aotearoa/New Zealand, while studying at the University of Auckland as an exchange student. She interned and carried out projects in several research institutes and non-profit organizations across the globe on international politics, sustainable community development, and nuclear-free advocacy. Apart from engagement in several scientific research programs and collaborations, she has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, including The Asian Journal of Peacebuilding. Additionally, she organized and chaired panels at international conferences, including The Association for Asian Studies, and received several scholarships.

She is currently a doctoral student at Hiroshima University, Japan, majoring in Peace Studies and Development Science. For her doctoral studies, she focuses on the environmental civil society organizations in post-Fukushima Japan. Since 2020, she has also been serving as an education and research support assistant to Prof. Noriyuki Kawano at the Center for Peace, Hiroshima University. As she values interdisciplinarity in her research portfolio, her research interests lie in the intersection of environmental mobilization and collective action, deliberative planning and decision making on energy resources, and Japanese civil society.

Pinar Temocin's LinkedIn Profile

The Foundation acknowledges that Pinar Temocin has successfully completed her project.