Bureaucratic Incrementalism and Crisis Politics
The selection of policy issues for the agenda, as well as the development, selection, implementation, and appraisal of policies, is not always rational. Decisions about which issues to address are not always based entirely on scientific, comprehensive judgments about their importance as social issues. Likewise, solutions are not necessarily adopted exclusively on the basis of their prospective technical effectiveness and efficiency.
According to classical linear policy making models, the ideal is for the socially more important issues to be selected, the most effective and efficient policies to be devised, adopted, and implemented. These policies then must be properly appraised, and perhaps adjusted or terminated, by technically competent bureaucrats (Anderson 1996). However, the results of several studies suggested that we cannot expect this level of competence from any policy maker. In the real world, rationality is limited (bounded). The abilities of policy makers can be restricted because of insufficient time, energy, and information, and/or because the political leadership cannot always be counted on to mobilize and support them (Simon 1991). Furthermore, individuals and social groups differ in their perceptions of issues, and politically powerful special interests might even oppose government involvement with an issue, as well as its authority to (re-)allocate the costs and benefits associated with its actions.
The problem is even more complicated when scientific knowledge concerning the potential, latent, and emerging hazards (such as asbestos), including their causal interrelationships, as well as the feasibility and effectiveness of possible policies, is incomplete (or not “fully” developed). Searching for complete knowledge is, in most cases, too much of a burden or simply impractical. The consideration or reconsideration of policy issues is necessarily punctuated.1 In such cases, therefore, satisficing might be the most realistic alternative. By taking this shortcut, aspira- tions can be adjusted and the search for alternatives ended as soon as some possible policy action is encountered that exceeds one’s aspiration level (Simon 1983).
In Japan, bureaucrats, in cooperation with expert panel members, have occasion- ally searched for domestic and foreign scientific reports and standard policy guide- lines related to previous and current asbestos regulations. In one way or another, the information derived therefrom has led to the revision of official regulations.
Permissible exposure limits have been lowered time and again. The JSOH, as an
1Argumentation is the key process through which citizens and policymakers arrive at moral judg- ments and policy choices. The argument is the link that connects data and information with the conclusions of an analytic study. However, the structure of an analytic argument is typically a complex blend of factual propositions, logical deductions, evaluations, and recommendations. In this context, evidence, when used in the argumentative process, is intrinsically instrumental. In other words, because perfect data are impossible, the standards of acceptance must be based on craft judgments of what is good enough for the functions the data perform in a particular problem.
Evidence is information selected from the available stock and introduced at a specific point in an argument to persuade the mind that a given factual proposition is true or false (Majone 1989).
academic society, was sometimes consulted by bureaucratic policy makers, who, in turn, drove the regulatory changes. International conventions, guidelines, and policy trends certainly alerted both agency officials and scientists to the need for a recon- sideration of the appropriateness of existing policies. They then had to justify their actions in scientific terms. If this justification was made in a clear and manifest way, it could have revealed how much of a health risk was assumed as acceptable.
Thus, bureaucrats have continually sought technical rationality, but for a long time they failed to exert sufficient effort to detect the latent health risks of asbestos to non- workers, or even to establish an information system to check the trends. Bureaucrats’
decision making was inevitably dependent on their environment, including their jurisdiction, motivation, the availability of information, support, and other resources, and their incremental decision making – incremental in terms of its accordance with scientific information updates, and international regulatory trends, and of changing policy measures adopted – had to be a satisficing one (Byron 2004; Simon 1983).
The EA justified its inaction through an audit, stating that its authority had long been confined to issues that could be handled by the “end-of-pipe regulation,” and that there had been little awareness or acceptance of the “precautionary principle”
by either policy makers or the society at large. The MHLW (formerly the MHW) defended itself by saying that it had taken the necessary measures based on their scientific assessments, and that the Ministry could not move faster without clear evidence of real health hazards. Bureaucratic turf wars and competition also hin- dered swift and concerted government action.
As a result, the “precautionary principle,” which was included in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development to justify early efforts at prevention even without full scientific certainty about the risks, has never been the core ideol- ogy driving asbestos regulation. In Japan, the Basic Environmental Plan of 1994, enacted after the Basic Environmental Law of 1993, incorporated the concept behind the precautionary principle, but this concept was never applied. During the discussion on the asbestos issue, the idea of precaution was only alluded to, although it was stated that it would be desirable to decrease (or at least, not to increase) the total amount of asbestos in society to prevent future health hazards.
This incremental policy making was interwoven with policy changes resulting from political initiative. Public concern about asbestos hazards was stirred by media reports on asbestos use in public schools in the 1980s. The media were obvi- ously aware of the former social and political debates on asbestos in the US, and their attention was aroused again in 2005 by the corporation’s disclosure of an increase in the incidence of cancer in its neighborhood. This disclosure also put asbestos on the agenda of the Diet. In the 1980s, the debate in the Diet mobilized various administrative agencies, e.g., the MHW and the MEd, to act; in the 2000s, they led to the enactment of the “Relief Act.”
This alternating mode of policy making has been modeled by Grindle (1991).
Differences in how issues are perceived have major impact on the process and pos- sibly even the results of policy making. The perception of either a crisis or politics- as-usual alters the dynamics of decision making, because it affects the political stakes for policy makers, altering their identity and their place in the hierarchy as
well as changing their time constraints.2 Whereas policy changes in the context of politics-as-usual are handled mainly with narrow clienteles or by taking into account “micro-political” relations within the bureaucracy, crises induce policy makers to consider “macro-political” effects (e.g., the impact upon their legitimacy and authority) and therefore to make a greater commitment to resolve the issues.
Policy makers usually sense that their capacities are limited. They are constrained by societal pressures and interests, lack of political stability and support, sociohis- torical factors, and bureaucratic incapacity. However, they usually continue to occupy a broad policy space, which allows them to exercise discretion in policy making, and/or gives them the ability to maneuver the policy space with the help of the technical, economic, political, and bureaucratic resources available to them.
A rise in public concern signifies a kind of political crisis. Failing to make delib- erate responses can be detrimental to the legitimacy of elected officials as well as administrative agencies. When the problem was limited to occupational hazards, bureaucratic policy making could take place: the risks were implicitly accepted, although it began to be argued that they had no threshold limit. When the problem extended to the health of the general public, on the other hand, efforts to reduce public concern were called for, even if that meant employing the precautionary principle. Especially in the 2000s, a large policy window allowed policy makers, highly inspired and mobilized by the threat to their legitimacy, to achieve major policy changes. Political mobilization helped the MHLW and the EA override bureaucratic turf wars and overcome resistance by the industry. Consequently, a new paradigm of legislative enactment was created that involved innovative meth- ods of financing, led by the Cabinet Office.
From this vantage point, both modes of policy making required a long time to introduce policies to detect and prevent the health hazards caused by asbestos expo- sure and to compensate the victims. Although health checkups for workers had been introduced, they did not seem to be entirely successful, especially because the disease registry for mesothelioma in Japan was established quite late (the late 1990s). Surveillance of workers’ families, people living near asbestos-handling factories, and the general population were never complete. Consequently, policy makers had to rely on a weak information base. Furthermore, bureaucrats and scientists had to wait for “sufficient” scientific evidence and/or authoritative recom- mendations from international organizations to guarantee their legitimacy.
On the other hand, politicians could act only when very large policy windows opened. Both in the 1980s and the 2000s, the media pushed asbestos onto the
2When dominated by a single interest, the subsystem is best thought of as a policy monopoly. A policy monopoly has a definable institutional structure responsible for policy making in an issue domain, and its responsibility is supported by some powerful idea or image. Punctuated- equilibrium theory includes periods of equilibrium or near-stasis, when an issue is captured by a subsystem, and periods of disequilibrium, when the issue is forced onto the macropolitical agenda.
When issues (areas) are on the macropolitical agenda, small changes in the objective circum- stances can cause large changes in policy (True et al. 1999). When a policy shifts to the macropo- litical institutions for serial processing, it generally does so in an environment of changing issue definitions and heightened attentiveness by the media and the broader public (Jones 1994).
agenda. By expanding the circle of asbestos victims from workers, a distinctive and limited population, to a broader population including school children, former patients, the workers’ families, and other people living near the factories, they made the problem worthy of political attention. Policy precedents were already available from abroad: laws on asbestos abatement in school buildings had been enacted in the US before 1980, and product bans had been gradually introduced in Europe before 2000. In Japan, a disease registry for mesothelioma that was established in 1997 disclosed a remarkably high incidence of asbestos poisoning among workers.
As the garbage-can model suggests, the convergence of these factors finally bore fruit a decade later in the Relief Act of 2006 (Kingdon 1995).
Policies for Safety and Reassuring the Public
Cases of para-occupational (familial) exposure have been reported since the 1970s.
Numerous persons who have been exposed to asbestos fibers as a result of living in the same household as an asbestos-exposed worker have contracted mesothelioma (Anderson et al. 1979; Kilburn et al. 1985). Furthermore, abnormally high disease rates have been associated with people who lived near asbestos mines and factories in the 1970s and the 1980s. However, the scientific evidence on the true health hazards of environmental exposure to asbestos in the general population is not convincing. In general, fiber concentrations in the atmosphere seem to be on the order of 1,000 times less than in the typical working environment. The EEC report concludes that air concentrations of this magnitude do represent a sufficient safety margin (Zielhuis 1977).
In the decades since then, the available data have not indicated that malignancies or functional impairments result from exposure to most airborne concentrations of asbestos in buildings. The models used to estimate cancer risk assume no particular threshold for cancer and suggest that any exposure at all is carcinogenic. In the absence of information on the risks of low-level asbestos exposure, the epidemio- logical findings from occupational studies have been used to extrapolate the risk in the general environment. The asbestos levels measured in indoor air cast some doubt on whether asbestos-containing materials make a significant contribution to the asbestos levels occupants are actually exposed to, even when some of the mate- rial is friable or in bad condition (Whysner et al. 1994)
Nonetheless, asbestos easily engenders fear and even panic in society. Asbestos has many attributes, called “outrage factors,” which sometimes cause media hype and defy rational calculations of risks and their acceptance (Covello et al. 1989;
Sandman 1993). Asbestos exposure is neither voluntary nor natural. It can result in dreadful cancers. Distribution of the benefits and costs, concerning the use of asbestos-containing products, is uneven across society. Political theories also sug- gest that clear causal stories, namely, the explanations of events that the causes are thought to be purposeful human actions, are likely to induce political mobilization (Stone 1998).
This was the case in Japan. When asbestos became a big social issue in the 1980s and 2000s, it posed a political challenge. In the former case, the policy clientele expanded from a chosen occupational group to the general public, who were characterized as the guardians of children, and the issue was pushed onto the political agenda. Elected officials and bureaucrats tried to soothe public (and, of course, parental) anxiety by introducing asbestos abatement programs for public buildings. In the latter case, the political spectacle itself was triggered by the com- pany’s disclosure in anticipation of possible damage to its corporate reputation.
Other companies followed suit, and the resulting increase in media hype, which was considerable beforehand, drove legislators to act.3
This remarkable increase in public concern, which at its height could be consid- ered a panic, indicates the presence of a social problem to be solved, whether it was real or a phantom. This panic had the potential to endanger social stability and cause additional problems. Furthermore, panic can result in the inefficient use of limited resources, as it can impair rational decision making and efficient implemen- tation of programs to resolve the problem. Additional programs may also be neces- sary to soothe public anxiety, even though this anxiety is sometimes disproportional to the actual threat as determined by technical judgments. Thus, the persistence of a social panic is a reflection of government incompetence, and therefore it is a genuine threat to the political legitimacy of policy makers, such as legislators and bureaucrats, as well as to the social and corporate legitimacy of organized interests such as the asbestos industry. In such a case, all the parties must make a commit- ment to extinguish the fire, to protect themselves by fending off public criticism.
This was also the case in the US in the 1980s. The recognition that asbestos- containing materials had been used in schools, governmental offices, and hospitals generated public concern about children’s health. The resulting political mobiliza- tion led to the enactment of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act of 1986, a mandate from the EPA that requires inspection of the nation’s public and private schools for asbestos. Around the time of the legislative debate, the Environmental Health and Safety Council of the American Health Foundation discovered that even complete removal of asbestos from all the buildings would provide no measurable benefits for public health (Whysner et al. 1994). The testimony at an EPA public hearing indicated that the claim of a huge risk to school children was not supported by the scientific evidence (Jones et al. 1996). These scientific arguments were over- whelmed by political considerations.
In Japan, the ban on asbestos products in the 2000s was justified by the argument that it is important to keep possible exposure levels everywhere as low as possible by stopping the production of asbestos so its use would not increase. Major policy changes, including the ban on asbestos use as a precautionary (preventive) measure,
3The increasing recourse to individual litigation against environmental risks poses real dangers for companies that previously might have had to contend only with the demands of state regulation.
The dominance of corporate, professional, and governmental defendants in the use of civil damage judgments as a policy instrument suggests that “toxic tort” is an extremely inefficient and inequi- table approach to environmental regulation (Galandter 1994).
were possible only when there was sufficient political leadership. At the insistence of the MHLW, the legislators in the Diet backed a total ban on asbestos, overriding industry resistance. This action certainly increased the symbolic appeal of the policy to the public by creating the impression that the government was taking deci- sive measures to forestall further hazards, and that domestic policy was catching up with the policies of other countries and the recommendations of international organi- zations. However, it is not clear how much a “complete” ban can really contribute to decreasing the hazards. Attempts to deal with concerns about the health risks associ- ated with asbestos exposure have been based on a mixture of scientific knowledge and social judgments, and activism has played an increasingly large role as well.
Thus, the government’s policies were intended not only to attain certain technical objectives (i.e., practical solutions to social issues, which were now recognized as worthy of attention), but also to accomplish political objectives (i.e., increasing politi- cal pressure, earning credits, and protecting legitimacy). Consequently, the policies in both periods were a hodgepodge of rational, scientifically justified decisions and unscientific palliatives intended to provide symbolic assurance (Edelman 1967).
A number of issues remain. They include the consistency of the policy debates, how scientific evidence is to be employed (including judgments on the validity and clarity of the available information), the degree of hazard and the socially acceptable margin of safety, the costs and benefits for both individuals and society, and, finally, how the above considerations can be integrated (Majone 1985). If scientific argu- ments were to be employed to soothe public anxiety and obscure the extent of the real hazards, it might be difficult to scientifically justify the introduction of arguably miti- gating measures on other occasions, unless sufficiently persuasive new evidence is presented. In other words, if scientific arguments were to be used to justify policy measures adopted for public reassurance but lacking a rigorous scientific foundation (including an appeal to the precautionary principle), it would be hard to find support for changes in the program without sufficient new scientific evidence on product safety. This would be true even if the revised policies seemed to be more rational in the sense that they seemed to be based on a scientific rationale. The role of science in justifying policy should be carefully revised and a new public image adopted.
An important question from the perspective of democracy is whether efforts have been made to build a social consensus thorough deliberation (Sato & Akabayashi 2005). A technical search for a consistently rational policy can be accomplished by using, for example, a cost-benefit analysis. Other methods, such as opinion polls and public hearings, can also be employed. In the case of asbestos, there were no such efforts until the last stage of product regulation, hazard mitigation, and victim com- pensation, namely, the debates concerning the Rescue Act of 2006.
The Nature of Policy: Styles of Regulation
Policy and politics set the goals of the government action (and inaction), allocating their costs and benefits to different social groups and individuals (Montgomery &
Rondinelli 1995). In some cases, the government imposes its policies on industry