ID: 1606
Presenting Author: Kohei Ishii
Session: 542 - Are We Living in the Post-Consultation Era?
Status: pending
This study compares public comments on Japan’s energy policy to reveal shared and differing public concerns, viewing them as social impact assessment within policy-making.
This study conducts a sentence-level comparative analysis of multiple sets of public comments submitted on Japan’s energy policy. In recent years, the diffusion of generative AI has accelerated the submission of public comments and diversified their content. Energy policy, which spans multiple administrative domains, encompasses several interrelated policy documents. Public comments submitted for each document are therefore expected to reflect varying focuses of concern and issue recognition depending on the document’s scope and character.
The study aims to clarify the similarities and differences in public concerns and perceptions across these policy documents. Each comment sentence is numerically represented based on its semantic features, and semantic proximity–based clustering is applied to extract the collective structure of public discourse. Through this analysis, the study seeks to identify how issues are shared or differentiated across related policy documents.
The public comment system constitutes an important mechanism of public participation in government-led policy formation, and its examination offers valuable insights for understanding participation within the context of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Understanding how citizens articulate their concerns and values at the policy formation stage also contributes to the broader perspective of Social Impact Assessment (SIA). From this standpoint, the study positions public comments as a participatory form of impact assessment and seeks to visualize their structural characteristics.
Kohei Ishii is a Ph.D. student at Chiba University. His research examines the influence of public participation on Japan’s environmental policy through applied text analysis.
Coauthor 1: Akihiro Kameda
Coauthor 2: Hidefumi Kurasaka