Seminar Series: Gaku Mitsumata
Join the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the UPEP Environmental Institution fall 2011 seminar series featuring leading experts discussing a variety of pressing environmentally focused topics.
| When |
Nov 21, 2011 from 04:15 pm to 05:45 pm |
|---|---|
| Where | LSRC A158 |
| Contact Name | Meg McKean |
Gaku Mitsumata of Hyogo University, will be the final speaker in the seminar series. His talk is titled "Communities Fight Back: Institutional Innovation to Preserve the Commons in Contemporary Japan."
Traditional legal arrangements in Japan awarded management rights, and sometimes ownership and tax-paying obligations, for common land, water and other natural resources to communities. The Meiji government that came into being in 1867 saw Japan's traditional commons as underutilized and attempted to claim many of these resource systems as imperial, national, or at least prefectural forests. Japan continues to go through waves of municipal amalgamation today, but the property wards that survived a century of legal attack now give Japanese communities the opportunity to rediscover the environmental services, income, local control, and participatory social capital that their commons, underappreciated a century ago, can provide.
Mitsumata is an associate professor of economics at Hyogo University, but he is currently participating in an exchange program in environmental education at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington.
