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Network analysis of scientific advisory committee integration in climate change policy: A comparison of Germany and Japan [1]

['Melanie Nagel', 'Institute Of Political Science', 'University Of Tübingen', 'Tübingen', 'Keiichi Satoh', 'Faculty Of Social Sciences', 'Hitotsubashi University', 'Tokyo', 'Adam Douglas Henry', 'School Of Government']

Date: 2023-06

Abstract According to the literature on Environmental Policy Integration (EPI), decisionmaking in complex domains of environmental policy—of which climate change is a prime example—tend to fragment and silo into individual dimensions of a problem. Scientific Advisory Committees (SACs) have been widely used to promote more integrated decisionmaking. SACs are intended to integrate the varied, and often fragmented, dimensions of policy problems, and this integration is widely believed to enable more effective use of science in climate change policy. This paper empirically evaluates the degree of integration achieved through SACs in two national climate policy contexts: Germany and Japan. Network analysis is used to examine the myriad scientific advisory committees focused on climate change policy in these nations (N = 218), and quantify the degree of vertical integration (integration among different sectors) and horizontal integration (integration among different governmental bodies). Results show greater vertical integration among German SACs than Japanese SACs, and similar levels of horizontal integration between the two nations despite having very different structures. Such efforts to empirically connect the conceptual discussion of integration in EPI with empirical observations of integration in actual climate policy processes is an important step towards understanding the strategies that may be used to promote more integrated decisionmaking in climate change policy.

Citation: Nagel M, Satoh K, Henry AD (2023) Network analysis of scientific advisory committee integration in climate change policy: A comparison of Germany and Japan. PLOS Clim 2(6): e0000222. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000222 Editor: Jennifer Lee Wilkening, US Fish and Wildlife Service, UNITED STATES Received: September 20, 2022; Accepted: May 3, 2023; Published: June 12, 2023 This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. Data Availability: The data is stored in a publicly available repository and can be accessed here at GITHUB: https://github.com/MelNa18/WissPol. Funding: This work was supported by the AFF (Committee for Research Questions) of the University of Konstanz, Germany, for the research project WissPol led by Prof. Dr. Volker Schneider, head of the research group "Material Theory of the State" at the University of Konstanz to MN. MN and KS conducted the research, analyzed the data, and published the results. KS received funding by the JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, grant Nr. 21K13440), and JST (Japan Science and Technology Agency; grant Nr. JPMJRX20J1). ADH contributed to the study without financial support.The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction It is widely believed that effective responses to climate change require the formation of networks that bring together diverse stakeholders and their knowledge systems [1]. Such networks are believed to enhance our collective ability to understand complex policy problems, and effectively use this understanding to develop innovative policy solutions [2, 3]. While the importance of integration in knowledge systems is widely discussed, however, there are relatively few examples of concrete and systematically-applied strategies to achieve this integration. In this paper we consider one such strategy and its effect on knowledge integration: National scientific advisory committees (SACs). SACs exist in numerous national climate change policy processes and bring together myriad stakeholders from science and policymaking to advise decisionmakers on climate change policy. The importance of integrated decisionmaking in environmental policy has been long recognized, at least since the Brundtland Report, which identified integrated decisionmaking as an important requirement to adequately cope with environmental challenges. This is a central focus of the Environmental Policy Integration (EPI) literature [4], which has also been applied to climate change in the literature on Climate Policy Integration (CPI; [5]). Lafferty and Hovden’s (2003) [6] definition of EPI emphasizes the importance of sectoral and environmental objectives, specifically the priority-principle of environmental issues in relation to other policy areas, justified by the fact of facing potentially irreversible damages to our life-support systems [5, 6]. Importantly, this literature provides clarity on what it means for decisionmaking to be “integrated,” including communication across sectors, collaboration among agencies and other policy participants on scientific issues, and joint implementation of programs. Since integration arises from connections between disparate policy actors, the concept of networks is a useful lens through which to observe and study integration. We define integration in our research context as the communication and collaboration among actors, organizations and institutions through SACs with the focus on mainstreaming environmental issues. Moreover, we differentiate integration into two subcategories: vertical and horizontal. Vertical integration refers to the integration within a particular governmental sector. Horizontal integration which refers to the integration across the governmental sectors [6]. While EPI boasts a rich field of conceptual work, there is still no standard approach to empirically measure integration. Extant empirical research that focuses on EPI as a core concept often examines information sharing among different organizations [7, 8]. Distinct from these studies that examine the communication among actors, we focus on the institutional settings (i.e., SACs), because institutional arrangements are a key prerequisite for developing actual communication relations. Moreover, we propose a method to assess the degree of integration by utilizing membership lists of SACs which are usually publicly available in many democratic countries. Applying network analysis, we examine not only the degree of vertical and horizontal integration through SACs but also analyse the factors that result in the integration in the case of Germany and Japan. Two research questions guide this research: To what extent are SACs in Germany and Japan vertically and horizontally integrated? What factors explain the variation in the degree of integration? (2) How does the influence of these factors differ across the two countries studied here (Japan and Germany)? The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Part two outlines the theoretical concept of EPI. Part three covers a short review of the literature of the study of SACs and the background of climate policy committees in Germany and Japan. In part four, the method, a combination of network analysis and regression analysis, will be described. In part five the results are presented. Finally, we summarize the most important findings and discuss the results of the study.

2. Environmental policy integration (EPI) and scientific advisory committees (SACs) Environmental policy integration (EPI) A policy system is integrated when policy issues are treated in a cross-cutting way, with actors and institutions involved in managing policy issues across boundaries of discipline, domain, or policy venue (for an overview see [9]). EPI argues for the importance of integration [4], and more recently, the literature on CPI applied these ideas to the particular context of climate change [5, 10] (CPI is not defined consistently in the literature and it is often referred to using the more established term EPI (see [11]). Since CPI is an application of EPI, we focus here on EPI as the general concept). Originally based on the Brundtland Report “Our Common Future” [12], European Union has tried policy integration in various policy issues and has been achieved mainly in the form of environmental policy integration [13]. EPI aims to harmonize economic, social, and environmental issues in order to systematically combine the seemingly incompatible objectives of economic competitiveness, social development, and environmental protection, thus supporting sustainable development [4]. Bornemann and Weiland [14] concluded that “whenever calls for policy integration were made concerning sustainability issues, EPI was the answer.” An important limitation with the EPI concept is that, although it is widely understood the importance of integration, it is often unclear how integration is to be achieved. We therefore need a better understanding of concrete strategies that may promote integration; such an understanding will help develop EPI as an actionable theory of environmental policy. One strategy to achieve integration—and the focus of this paper—is the formation of national-level SACs [15–17]. Scientific advisory committees (SACs) Scientific advisory committees have become widely used as a relatively stable, institutionalized place for creating a link between science and policy [18] (Glynn et al. 2003). The research on advisory committees over the last decades is broad and diverse, with several different notions existing side by side. “SAC” is a term that has emerged in several newer publications, mostly in the field of health policy [15–17], with serious efforts to reorganise the field and establish a common research line. Groux et al. [16] developed a definition and typology of SACs, which are organised either by the government or civil society organizations as follows: a) they are groups of individuals with relevant expertise, b) these experts provide their expertise to decision-makers, and c) their advice is grounded on research evidence from natural or social sciences. According to Leifeld and Schneider [19], these policy committees at the national level consist of governmental and non-governmental actors which participate in collective policy deliberation, decision-making and implementation. Following the typologies of Groux et al. [16] and Fischer and Leifeld [20], SACs are understood to be venues where different actors from science and policy-making meet together to consult, deliberate or make recommendations for decisions for the legislative or executive purposes. Notably, climate change is a policy domain that stretches across multiple issues where various type of stakeholders have diverse views and interests. This requires synthesis of knowledge sharing and coordination in policymaking process. From an organizational and procedural perspective, SACs represent an institutionalized venue with the aim of connecting different sectoral views through the scientific exchange in these respective committees. SACs produce diverse and scientifically-grounded knowledge about a policy issue, which in turn is a necessary condition for optimal decision-making in complex policy fields where various sectors and bodies are involved in governance [21, 22]. In the governmental organizational context, the integration concept is more fruitfully discussed by differentiating between vertical and horizontal integration. Vertical integration is manifest when SACs promote the exchange of different sectoral views, and where the discussion becomes input for the governmental body served by the SAC. Lafferty and Hovden [6] refer to this as vertical integration in reference to the integration in the state-society relationship. By contrast, horizontal integration is Integration among different governmental bodies. The horizonal integration is necessary to achieve the integration across different issues, because SACs are typically organized within each distinct policy issue. Measurement of vertical and horizontal integration How can vertical and horizontal integration through SACs be analysed empirically? In this paper, we focus on the formal membership in SACs. SAC members are expected to bring in their expertise, and therefore integration occurs through the communications among those SAC members. By connecting the aforementioned distinction between vertical and horizontal integration, two aspects of the membership are examined. Vertical integration is measured by asking whether SAC members are recruited from diverse sectors. It is repeatedly observed that in the climate policy domain the interests and worldviews are particularly different between economic sectors and environmental groups [23, 24], but also between national and local governments [25], and scientists and non-scientists [8]. Securing the chances for actors from various sectors to speak out and listen to others in the SACs is a necessary condition for enhancing EPI. Horizontal integration is measured by asking whether membership in SACs is constructed in a way it crosses boundaries of governmental bodies. Bureaucratic systems are generally developed such that each ministry and its subdivisions are responsible for a particular issue [26]. Committee membership therefore tend to correspond to the governmental body’s boundary of substantive focus. In reality, governmental bodies will sometimes be responsible for the same or inter-related issues. This leads to conflicts among governmental bodies (among ministries in particular) (A typical example is the Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry for the Economy). and is a common issue in climate change politics, because environmental, economic, agricultural, and transportation issues are involved. Importantly, these conflicts tend to occur along with the fact that each governmental body has completely different members in their SACs [27, 28]. If there is no exchange of information between the SACs, proposals under discussion will not be optimally coordinated and will therefore not result in an integrated climate policy output. Accordingly, for the integration of expertise across governmental bodies, a certain degree of membership overlaps between the ministries is required, as members can transmit the information from one committee to another. There are certainly many other channels of communication between SACs leading to policy integration, such as personal contacts between members in different committees, or sending the policy recommendation to other committees. However, such subtle evidence is hard to compare in different countries. We argue that membership overlap is a systematic, observable matric of stable and institutionalized communication among different SACs. Case selection Our data come from SACs in two different national contexts: Japan and Germany. They are the largest Western industrial nations after the US, sharing a similar size of GDP and population. Japan and Germany are the fifth and seventh largest emitter of the greenhouse gas in the world, respectively [29]. Moreover, they share some institutional commonalities [28, 30, 31]. Both countries are classified as consensus democracies [32], and advisory committees play a significant role in the phase of policy formulation [28]. Now we turn to the question of how we selected the SACs for both countries and define the object of investigation based on existing literature and document research. To begin, we included the following “main committees”(“Wesentliche Gremien“) (In the sense of Art. 3.2 of the Federal Law on Appointment of Executive Bodies (“Bundesgremienbesetzungsgesetz”)) into the data set. In Germany, those committees that are responsible for the government and the parliament were included. In Japan, the corresponding counterpart of these main committees are “shingikai”, and “iinkai” in some cases. By contrast, we excluded the following bodies because their main consultant target is neither the state nor the parliament, but private or third sector organizations (It should, however, be noted that it seems that in Germany the difference between those committees targeted for states and those for private/third sectors are not as strictly differentiated as in Japan. For example, it is quite common that both types of committees to be listed under the same list “Gremien”, whereas in Japan the latter body is completely separated and the latter is regarded as a third body (Gaikaku Dantai). Because of this institutional difference, it is rather difficult to identify the “Aufsichtsrat” equivalent of the third sector organization in Japan). Those excluded bodies are supervisory boards (“Aufsichtsgremien”) (As defined in Art. 3.1 Bundesgremienbesetzungsgesetz), foundations (“Stiftungen”in German, “Zaidan” in Japanese), foundation boards (“Stiftungsrat”in German, “Kansa”in Japanese), supervisory board for private companies such as interest groups or NGOs (e.g. “Supervisory board German energy agency Inc.”, “Aufsichtsrat Deutsche Energie-Agentur GmbH”, or”Gaibu-iinkai”since in Japanese but there is no fixed term for this type of committee), and Committees of the Bundesrat or the Bundestag (as long as they are comprised only by party members). In Japan, the purpose of the SACs is first and foremost to gather expertise. This is in accordance with the country’s advisory committee law. Many scientists and academics are involved in the committees. These committees consist of private actors who are reappointed every two years. As several reappointments are possible, some members have been appointed to these committees for more than ten years. Regular committees (“shingikai”) are central committees that consist of sections, often also subsections and working groups, and in some cases there are even sub-working groups. Additionally, there are ad-hoc discussion committees (“kentokai” or “kondankai”) that are not formally affiliated with these regular committees. Until the ministerial reform in 2001, advisory committees were often criticized because of their lack of transparency. However, since 2001, almost all membership lists and minutes are publicly available. Still, some criticize that this transparency actually prevents effective discussion, as most members only represent their position to justify their efforts to their fellow groups, which is sometimes referred to as “position talk” (simply arguing the organizational official stance without considering the flow of discussion) [26]. The appointments are made exclusively by administrative staff, which is why these committees are often said to form an inner circle [33]. In Germany, the purpose of the SACs is, in contrast to Japan, mainly to gather expertise, coordinate efforts, and legitimize action rather than gathering scientific information. Regarding the membership of German committees, ministry employees and politicians can also be formal members of such a committee. It is also more common than in Japan for a ministry employee to be an official member of a committee organized by another ministry. The organizational structure of German committees is very flat and there are committees with specific working groups. With regard to transparency, we discovered that in Germany information on these committees is less transparent than in the Japanese case. However, in most cases, a final report is publicly available. If we consider the nomination of the members, we notice that political parties are actively involved in the appointment process. There are both ministerial and parliamentary committees. A recent famous example of the latter is the “Ethics Commission” for nuclear energy policy set up after the Fukushima nuclear accident which had the purpose to give advice and consult on how to deal with nuclear hazards. Systematic evaluations of SACs are rare (but see [34–36]), therefore our research question in this context is exploratory and is intended to further develop the field. Even though SACs are key forum for discussing and formulating policy proposals in both Germany and Japan [7, 27], there are cultural and institutional differences in terms of the network structure and the organization of SACs. Our research questions (stated in the introduction, above) are based on these considerations.

3. Data and method Our data set consist of the national governmental SACs existing between 2010–2015 in Germany and Japan, with a topical relationship to climate change. There is no list of specifically climate-related advisory bodies in both countries, so we visited the websites of individual ministries and government agencies and manually identified the relevant SACs and their members. When compiling the dataset, we encountered a few issues in terms of comparison. As previously described, the Japanese SACs are institutionally more nested. Hence, it could be problematic to simply compare the degree of integration by including all single committees, because by doing so, we could overestimate the degree of integration in the Japanese case. Therefore, we decided to exclude those sub-committees whose members are completely included in the set of parent committee members (Formally, this was tested if Szymkiewicz-Simpson overlap coefficient is 1 or not. The Shimpson overlap coefficient is defined as , where |C m | and |C n | is the set of members of advisory committee C m and C n , respectively). As a consequence, we were able to identify 174 different SACs for the Japanese case. Concerning the availability of data, there is a lower transparency for the German SACs. In Germany, membership lists are typically available in the supporting information of the committees’ final reports. However, membership information was available online only for 44 out of the 49 committees which we identified (Even after several attempts (telephone calls, e-mails, internet searches) to gather all of these data, it was not possible to collect all). Measuring vertical integration through membership sectoral diversity Vertical integration is measured through the diversity of sectors participating in SACs. To describe the sector an actor belongs to, each member is coded according to the following categories: government, science, business, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), media, local governments (i.e., states in Germany and prefecture in Japan as well as cities in both countries), individual university researchers, and political parties (for details see S1 Text). As an indicator of the sectoral diversity of SAC members, we utilize the inverted version of Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) (Formally, HHI is defined as , where P i is the proportion of each sector and k is number of categories of sectors). HHI is widely used for measuring the degree of market monopoly. The inversed version of this index (i.e., ) is used for calculating the diversity (e.g., [37, 38]). The diversity index takes the minimum value 1 when all members in a SAC are from the same sector. On the other hand, the diversity index takes the maximum value when the proportions of each sectors member belong to are even. Measuring horizontal integration through memberships overlap Horizontal integration is measured through membership overlap across SACs. As a concrete indicator of membership overlap, we use the Dice coefficient of the members in the pair of committees (Formally, let |C m | and |C n | be a set of membership of the committee C m and C n , respectively. Then, the Dice coefficient of the two committee is, ) that ranges from zero (no overlap) to one (complete overlap). A high Dice coefficient means that there is a high degree of overlap of members between two committees. Accordingly, we conceptualize that a high degree of overlap among committees can be viewed as a high level of horizontal integration. We calculated the Dice coefficient for every pair of SACs in each country. As an illustration, consider the constellation of SACs in case 1 in Fig 1. Case 1 is the one with no membership overlaps at all among committees, hence no horizontal integration. In Case 2, it is more integrated than case 1 because there are some membership overlaps (actor 3 and 6). PPT PowerPoint slide

PNG larger image

TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Illustration of overlap of committee members. Note: A-F indicates SACs and 1–7 indicates actors. The edges in the upper figures show that the actor is a member of the committees. The number in the bottom figures indicates the Dice coefficient of membership overlaps between committees. Avg. is the average Dice coefficient in each case. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000222.g001 Concerning membership, we coded the members of each committee at the organizational level, not the individual (person) level. Two committees are therefore regarded to be sharing members if the members have the same organizational affiliation (even if the individual people are different). The reasoning behind this procedure is that most of the committee members are selected based on their organization affiliation. It is only for the university that we cannot apply the above reasoning, since each researcher may be selected independent of his or her university affiliation. In this special case, therefore, university researchers are treated as individual. Those who do not have any organizational affiliation are also treated as individuals. Issue of the advisory committee Horizontal and vertical integration may vary across SACs that deal with different issues. The issues dealt with by a SAC are coded by the authors according to the following categories, recognizing that a SAC may have several issues (see S1 Text for the detail) (To ensure the comparability, one author of this paper who reads both Japanese and German cross-checked the adequacy of the coding in both country data): target (e.g., emission reduction target) (Target means in this context there are specific targets that are defined, e.g., a percentage for the reduction of emissions by a certain date), energy, nuclear, science, technology and development, business and product regulation, local (e.g. local government climate policy) (Local refers to the fact that the committees are concerned with national policy programs that relate specifically to the local level of implementation. This is a specific feature of the German federalism), ethics, and transportation. Understanding drivers of integration To identify the factors that result in horizontal integration, we utilize the multiple regression quadratic assignment procedures (MRQAP) tests [39, 40]. MRQAP tests are permutation tests (Among the various permutation methods, we used “double semi-partialling” following the recommendation by Dekker et al. (2007) [39]). for multiple linear regression model coefficients for data organized in square matrices of relatedness among objects. In our case, the observation organized in the matrices is the relation between the committees. Our dependent variable Y is the degree of horizontal integration measured by the Dice coefficients of membership overlap between advisory committees (Formally, the dependent variable is k×k Dice coefficient matrix Y, which consists of k advisory committees and an entry y nm in Y is a dice coefficient between the advisory committee n and m). Each entry in the matrix indicates the Dice coefficient between a pair of SACs; namely, how the members in two SACs are overlapped. For the independent variable, we enter several possible driving forces that can cause membership overlap as listed below. As our dependent variable is a matrix, we also need to create a matrix for each independent variable X, meaning that our unit of observation is the pair of committees. However, for some independent variables, the dependent variable comes from the attribute of each SAC, not a pair of SACs. In those cases, we use the sum method, which is a sum of the relevant attributes of two SACs. Let us take the size of the committee matrix (i.e., X2 in the explanation below) as an example. If number of members in committee A and B is 3 and 5, respectively, the entry for A-B (i.e., x2 AB ) of this matrix is 8, meaning that the sum of the number of committee members in A and in B is 8. If this sum method is used, it is specifically indicated. In the description below, X1 indicates the matrix of the first independent variable. The same logic applies for X2, X3, …, X7 (see S2 Text for detail). X1. Same Ministries: Whether two committees belong to the same ministry (coded as 1) or not (coded as 0).

Whether two committees belong to the same ministry (coded as 1) or not (coded as 0). X2. Size of the committee (sum method): Sum of the number of members in two committees.

(sum method): Sum of the number of members in two committees. X3. Sectoral diversity of the committee (sum method): Sum of the sectoral diversity index of two committees. Note that the sectoral diversity is the one for measuring the degree of vertical integration in a SAC, as discussed above.

(sum method): Sum of the sectoral diversity index of two committees. Note that the sectoral diversity is the one for measuring the degree of vertical integration in a SAC, as discussed above. X4. Same issue : Whether two committees handle the same topic (coded as 1) or not (coded as 0).

: Whether two committees handle the same topic (coded as 1) or not (coded as 0). X 5. Organizational category (sum method): Sum of the coefficient of the specialization of each organizational category of two committees. In brief, this coefficient indicates how much a particular organizational type is present in a SAC given the country’s average.

5. (sum method): Sum of the coefficient of the specialization of each organizational category of two committees. In brief, this coefficient indicates how much a particular organizational type is present in a SAC given the country’s average. X6. Prominent actor (sum method): Sum of the prominence actor scores in two committees. The prominence of an actor is calculated as the number of committees this actor belongs to. A committee level prominence score is the average of the prominence of committee members.

(sum method): Sum of the prominence actor scores in two committees. The prominence of an actor is calculated as the number of committees this actor belongs to. A committee level prominence score is the average of the prominence of committee members. X7. Multi-issue actor (sum method). Sum of the multi-issue actor score in two committees. In essence, multi-issue score of an actor is calculated by how wide range of committees in terms of their issues this actor simultaneously belongs to, which indirectly indicates the range of issues this actor can speaks of. A committee level multi-issue actor score is the average of the multi-issue actor score of committee members. In the calculation, model 1 conducts the regression against the whole set of committees in Japan and Germany. By contrast, model 2 limits the observations to the entries of the matrix that indicates the membership overlap between committees belonging to different ministries. This allows us to specify the factors that result in horizontal integration among ministries. In a similar vein, model 3 limits the observation to the entries of the matrix that correspond to membership overlaps between committees that handle different issues. This allows us to specify the factors that result in the horizontal integration across different issues. The calculation was done by R [41] and R package sna [42].

5. Discussion and conclusions The EPI literature argues that communication and collaboration across various sectors and public agencies, and coordinating decisionmaking, are key for the effective management of sustainability issues [4, 13, 43]. SACs are one of the important institutionalized venues that can promote integration [20]. Using this as motivation, we have empirically investigated the degree of vertical and horizontal integration of SACs in Japan and Germany. Regarding vertical integration (i.e., sectoral diversity in SAC membership), the vertical integration of German SACs is almost twice that of Japanese SACs. Japanese SACs are dominated by three sectors, namely, scientific organizations, business groups, and university researchers. By contrast, in German SACs, NGOs and local governments are more present than in Japan. In addition to the difference in diversity, it is worth noting that in Japan the prominent actors (i.e., those actors being in many SACs) are dominated by those organizations affiliated with the Ministry of the Economy. In Germany, environmental NGOs and local governments are listed in the top 10 prominent actors. Regarding horizontal integration (i.e., membership overlaps across SACs), the degree of integration is almost the same in Japan and Germany. Nevertheless, the way the horizontal integration is achieved is different. The membership overlaps in Japanese SACs predominantly occurs among SACs that belong to the same ministries. The result suggests that relatively similar information is distributed among SACs under the same ministries, leading to the integration within a ministry. The flip side is that it results in a segregation of information; information may not circulate well between ministries whose policy orientation is different, which is a finding that is consistent with the existing literature [7]. In Germany, the committees are more dispersed and there is less membership overlap, but there is also less segregation of the SACs under the different ministries. This appears to result in a similar level of horizontal integration between two countries. Together with another result—that SACs handling the same issues does not lead to the membership overlaps in German SACs (Table 5)—the finding suggests that German committees define issues in a narrow way. In line with this interpretation, the literature argues that committees in Germany tend to be very technical and expert-based and solutions to environmental problems have been favoured on the basis of technological innovations [44, 45]. Because of the high issue-ownership of each committee, it can be interpreted that each of them has an unchallenged decision-making competence. In addition, each committee includes actors from different areas (such as NGOs, scientists, business organizations). One study [44] argues that this combination of high issue-ownership and high vertical integration contribute to the deliberation of the discussion from different political stances. Despite the different characteristics of horizontal integration in Japan and Germany, we find the common underlying factors that leads to the membership overlaps among committees. Those factors include committees belonging to the same ministry, having a larger number of members, having many prominent actors and multi-issue actors (i.e., actors who can speak about multiple issues). In addition, in our cases the nuclear issue caused a higher overlap of members in both countries. This may be an artifact of the timing of data collection (2010 to 2015). Methodologically, we have demonstrated the utility of membership lists of SACs for the empirical assessment of vertical and horizontal integration. Membership lists are usually publicly available and we can set a common criterion for comparing the integration in different countries. There are also several limitations in our study, and we point out three important avenue for further investigation. First, this research addresses the empirical question of the extent to which learning occurs among members of SACs. While we have argued that being in a same committee in SACs is a necessary condition for communication among participants, it may be not always sufficient for environmental policy integration (EPI). One study [46] found that participants in committees tend to obtain policy advice from those whose views are similar to their own, suggesting SACs are not always enabling policy learning. But more research in this regard needs to be done. Second, while we considered scientific knowledge integration among different sectors and governmental bodies, there is also a growing interest on how indigenous knowledge alongside scientific knowledge is integrated in the governance [47]. We believe our operationalization would also be extensible for empirical studies that investigate the science and indigenous knowledge integration for EPI. Third, whether and how the vertical and horizontal integration in SACs enhances the effective policy implementations requires empirical investigation. As reviewed, this is the widely discussed proposition in the extant literature. However, the actual investigation is rather rare. We believe that our results can thus provide a starting point for further empirical research.

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