Original article Role Sharing among Stakeholders in Collaboration Projects for Lake Basin Conservation Naoko HIRAYAMA* and Shinji IDE* Abstract：Collaborative activities among governments, NPOs, private companies, and citizens are essential for lake basin conservation. To clarify the differences of forms of collaboration and factors determining the forms, the authors investigated all the prefectural governments in Japan if they have conservation plans for lakes and collaborative activities carried out within the plans, and what is the role of each stakeholder in the activities. As a result, 110 collaborative activities were implemented at 18 lakes in 2016. According to the type of role sharing and visualized roles of respective stakeholders, 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; and “Government initiative type” activities have various forms of role sharing even in similar projects. Key Words： water environment, citizen participation, cooperation, cluster analysis independently. In addition, initiatives by INTRODUCTION cooperation between governments and diverse actors are increasing due to high expectations for Water environments are valuable as water NPOs to resolve public issues since the Act on resources for daily lives and irrigation. Promotion of Specified Non-profit Activities was Additionally, they nurture the ecosystems, support enacted in 1998. Role sharing by utilizing the local fisheries, and provide unique culture and characteristics of different actors (i.e., by sceneries. However, river, lake, and swamp collaborating) enables efficient and effective environments are susceptible to activities within activities. These can maximize resources and time, the watershed. For example, the water improve current initiatives, and adeptly respond to environment is directly and indirectly affected by new challenges. In particular, it is essential for domestic wastewater, the usage of pesticides and watershed upstream and downstream fertilizers in farming, and activities for forest conservation activities to collaborate with the management and environmental conservation. fields of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Consequently, various actors, including NPOs, Many studies have investigated collaborative primary industry workers, private companies, activities for water environment conservation governments, and local residents participate in focusing on particular projects. Examples include water environment conservation activities. research on consensus building and possibilities Example activities include cleaning and biological for collaboration of the Nature Restoration Project research in rivers. Similar activities with the same at Azame-no-Se (Tomita, 2010), a study to purpose are often managed by different actors elucidate the collaboration process between a * Department of Environmental Policy and Planning, School of Environmental Sciences, The University of Shiga Prefecture 68 Journal of Environmental Information Science Vol.2020, No.1 research center and the local area for coral reef resources and time. The result of this study can be conservation in Ishigaki Island (Kamimura et al., used as basic information to evaluate the efficiency 2017). Another example is research on the and effectivenss of collaboration. differences in attitude between upstream and Collaboration in this research is defined as an downstream residents and the possibilities for “initiative of two or more actors cooperating to collaboration with regard to the river environment resolve public issues.” By “cooperating,” we mean conservation of the Katsuura River in Tokushima these actors share one or more of the following prefecture (Kozuki et al., 1999). In addition, an types of resources: 1) funds, 2) human resources, 3) evaluation study examined the role of materials, 4) physical space/opportunity, 5) skills, intermediary organizations to facilitate and 6) network. collaborative management (Satoh et al., 2016). For meta-analysis of multiple collaboration cases, Kim 1. METHODS et al. researched cases of watershed management in Eastern Japan. They categorized collaborative The research targets were 195 lakes in Japan efforts based on the rate of governmental financial published in “Zenkoku Koshō Shiryōshū vol. 20” support and the number of local organizations. (National Council for Lake Environmental Then they analyzed the characteristics of Conservation, 2008). We confirmed the existence of collaborative efforts (Kim et al., 2003). Sugahara lake conservation projects by making calls and et al. compared waterside social experiment cases involved distributing survey questionnaires to the in 19 cities across Japan and studied the local municipalities of lakes where the projects contributions of measure councils that act as occurred. Questions in the survey included the intermediaries to promote collaboration between name and the duration of the plan, total number of governments and citizens (Sugahara et al., 2016). implemented projects for the plan in FY 2016 by However, these works do not corroborate the forms each division, total budget, and number of and shared roles of collaboration. collaborative projects. If the municipality plan Particularly lake environment flow slowly. Thus, included collaboration projects, we obtained the complicated phenomena are entwined during a project name, the name of the division acting as long period of stillness, making lakes more the project main contact, roles of the primary and environmentally susceptible to natural and other actors, achievements, and budget for FY artificial stresses in the watershed. This results in 2016. The survey took place between April 27 to more difficult conservation efforts (Nakamura et August 10, 2018. al., 2007). In this study, with an investigation into We received responses for 195 lakes. Of these, 29 collaborative activities between “governments” and lakes had a conservation plan, but 166 did not. the “other actors” for lake basin conservation, the Lake Inba-numa, Lake Tega-numa, and Lake authors tried to visulalize differences of forms of Nakaumi each had two plans, while Lake Biwa collaboration for clarifying the differences had three plans. Lake Inawashiro and Lake quantitatively and factors determining the forms. Urabandai, and Lake Yuno and Lake Chūzenji The visualized and quantitative information were found together in separate plans. We concerning forms of collaboration would make it conducted collaboration project status surveys for possible to compare the forms of collaboration at 31 of 32 plans. The Lake Biwa plan did not have different lakes in terms of role burden of each activities in FY 2016. We obtained responses for 28 stakeholder, the number of types of sharing plans. Of the 22 plans with collaborative activities, resources, and the degree of involvement of private there were 110 collaboration projects. sectors as a relatively rare case. We believe that Then we categorized the stakeholders of a collaborarive activities should have advantages collaboration project into one of fifteen types over non-colloaborative ones, such as saving (Table 1), and the roles in a collaboration project Journal of Environmental Information Science Vol.2020, No.1 69 Table 1 List of stakeholders into one of twelve types (Table 2). Excluding the 6 Classification Subclassification projects overlapping in two plans for Lake Biwa, 1 Government Department in charge 2 Other department we categorized by role sharing and visualized the 3 Local government roles of each actor. Specifically, we confirmed 4 National government “actors in a collaboration project,” “roles of each 5 Measure council Network association by gov. 6 Educational/ School actor,” and “concrete tasks of the role” to identify 7 Research sector University the actor and its role. Then we carried out cluster 8 Research institute 9 Civil sector Network organization analysis using the number of playing each role of 10 NPO 12 types by each stakeholder of 5 types 11 Resident's association (classification), by SPSS statistics 25. Then we 12 Event executive committee 13 Citizen constructed a table to show the number of projects 14 Private sector Fishermen’s /Farmers’ union by combining the “fifteen types of actors” and 15 Private company “twelve types of roles.” To compare lakes with Table 2 List of collaboration roles different numbers of collaboration projects, we A Planning divided the value of each cell by the total values of B Preparation and Cleanup the cells. Using these values, we visualized the C Management combination of actors and their roles using Pajek D Activity E Funding (Yasuda et al., 2012, Satoh 2006), which is a social F Announcement network analysis software. Finally, we considered G Provision of Information the factors influencing the characteristics of each H Provision of Human resources I Provision of Skills type and role. J Provision of Materials K Provision of Physical space/Opportunity 2. STATUS OF COLLABORATION PROJECTS L Secretariat Table 3 shows 28 lake conservation plans with a collaboration project. The right-side cells in the Table 3 Lake basin conservation plans Name of Plan Prefecture & City Abbreviation of plan