During the research period, we tried to conduct two kinds of surveys (Global Environmental Policy Network Surveys, for short GEPON surveys and Cross-national Surveys on Civil Society Organizations and Interest Groups, for short JIGS surveys) for respective four countries, Japan, Korea, the U.S.and Germany. We actually did them in former three countries and regarding German survey we finally completed them in the year of 2000.
As for the preparation of analysis, first we cleaned the data and published all codebooks in Japanese for total eight surveys : in 1999 for Korea and Japan, and 2001 for the U.S.and Germany.
Regarding the GEPON data, we compare Japan and Korea as for 1) the size of policy networks, concretely the numbers of major actors, 2) the composition of variety of different category organizations, or the proportion of their share in the networks, 3) the influence-evaluation ranking of respective actors. While both countries share the similar composition of actor categories, Japan, interestingly, has relatively small network size with bureaucracy and business bias (relative supremacy of them) rather than those of Korea that shows relatively media and NGOs bias in reverse. In addition, we conducted a network analysis to know the structure of policy networks in Japan in order to draw a structural relational map among actor-clusters.
Concerning the JIGS data, we compared three countries (Japan, Korea and the U.S.), and then wrote a series of articles that is now under preparation for publication as a book. Major findings are related to similarities and differences among three. One example is that in Japan there has been a steady growth of civil society organizations in general but it still has a tendency of developmentalism (producer and business sector bias) in comparison to other two. However even in Japan, in 1990 there is a wave-like surge of NGOs and NPOs that succeeded in institutionalization as NPO law.