Author(s): Naoko Hirayama
Email (s): hirayama.n@ses.usp.ac.jp
Institution or organization of origin: The University of Shiga Prefecture
Country: Japan
Abstract:
Collaborative activities among various actors, including governments, NPOs, private companies, and citizens are essential for lake basin conservation. Aiming to clarify the factors affecting the forms of collaboration, the authors investigated 195 lakes of all the prefectural governments in Japan if they have conservation plans for lakes and collaborative activities carried out within the plans, and grasped the details of the activities between “governments” and the “other actors”. As a result, we confirmed 110 collaborative activities in 22 plans of 18 lakes. The activities included 31 activities being related to cleaning ones, 23 to enlightenment ones, 18 to environmental education, 17 to participatory water quality surveys, and 16 to communication events. According to the type of role sharing and visualized roles of respective stakeholders, collaborative activities in the activities could be categorized into the following four types: “Council initiative type”, “Government initiative type”, “Well-balanced type”, and “Environmental education type”. It was also revealed that all “Council initiative type” activities have similar forms of collaboration as the measure councils were established by respective local governments and have had fixed relationships with the governments for many years; “Government initiative type” activities have various forms of role sharing even in similar activities; and “Well-balanced type” can be regarded as an advanced form of collaboration because a wide variety of activities are being conducted. Regarding the last type, it may be however difficult to manage or maintain the collaboration since many stakeholders are involved and sharing of roles becomes complicated.
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