Rural Environment, Self-Governance of Local Common-Pool Resources and Development Planning in Japan

Abstract

"We can identify two major rural environments: the infrastructural rural environment and the non-infrastructural rural environment. The former refers to rural natural resources such as irrigation, farmland, forestry, and fisheries, and the later to externalities or incidents such as pollution of irrigation water because of industrial wastes or excess use of chemical pesticides, crop damage because of acid rain, rural population pressure on farmland and urban population pressure on rural farmland. In this paper while we are mainly concerned with Japan's infrastructural rural environment with special reference to self-governance issues of common irrigation system as a common-pool resource (CPR), we will briefly illustrate some important aspects of non-infrastructural one."