The Ainu and Indigenous politics in Japan: negotiating agency, institutional stability, and change

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

Disrupting the Growth Machine: Evidence from Hawai‘i

For much of its modern history, growth machine dynamics in Hawai‘i prevailed on a regional scale. Strikingly, recent events suggest that the hegemony of Hawai‘i’s growth machine has been disrupted. This article offers an in-depth case study of a major luxury development project on the island of Hawai‘i where development interests were thwarted despite the support of growth interests and local government officials. I show how local protesters made use of state-level historic preservation law, Native Hawaiian burial protections, state-level agricultural boundaries, and frames and meanings of land promulgated by the Native Hawaiian movement. Viewing this stalled housing project as an extended case study reveals how regional institutions and flexible social movement frames can be leveraged to promote alternatives to growth machines. I also highlight how distinctive regional institutions—that have evolved over time through institutional layering—may be prompting growth machine disruption in Hawai‘i, an understudied tourism and real-estate dependent economy. Finally, the case study suggests specific ways that local mobilization interacts with global economic downturns to shape spatial outcomes.

“Machinery” or “spirit” of the welfare state: institutional change as institutional inertia

Purpose Much has been said about institutional change and the forms it can take, whether it is abrupt or incremental, path breaking or path dependent. This strand of research is highly relevant in times of welfare institutional reforms and changes. A puzzle, however, remains, and it concerns the empirical phenomena that there might be institutional inertia despite seeming change. One reason for this remaining puzzle is, as argued here, that the ongoing theoretical reflections have a certain blind spot: “institutional constellations” and their characteristics. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to analyse the “layering” of a welfare institution which results in an institutional constellation. Design/methodology/approach Such newly established institutional constellations, though they look roughly similar and are formed of comparable ingredients, can differ profoundly between themselves. This could be due to the fact that the characteristics of institutions depend on the regulating principles (the “spirit”) implemented in them. To validate this hypothesis, the author analyses in depth the institutional layering in two traditionally different social protection systems: the Dutch and the German pension systems. Findings In both cases, as the author shows, the traditional regulating principles are also implemented in the newly established institutional constellation, so that in the end pension systems do not change but differ as they did before. Originality/value The empirical phenomenon of institutional inertia despite seeming change has not yet been explicitly addressed. This is the case since the ongoing theoretical reflections have a certain blind spot: “institutional constellations” and their characteristics which are the focus of this paper.