15.06.2021 - 16:18

The Thesis of Hanno Jentzsch has been published

Harvesting State Support. Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture. University of Toronto Press, 2021

Agriculture has been among the toughest political battlegrounds in post-war Japan and represents an ideal case study in institutional stability and change. Inefficient land use and a rapidly aging workforce have long been undermining the economic viability of the agricultural sector. Yet vested interests in the small-scale, part-time agricultural production structure have obstructed major reforms. Change has instead occurred in more subtle ways. Since the mid-1990s, a gradual reform process has dismantled some of the core pillars of the post-war agricultural support and protection regime. Harvesting State Support analyzes this process by shifting the analytical focus to the local level.
Drawing on extensive qualitative field research, Hanno Jentzsch investigates how local actors, including farmers, local governments, and local agricultural cooperatives, have translated abstract policies into local practice. Showing how local variants are constructed through recombining national reforms with the local informal institutional environment, Harvesting State Support reveals new links between agricultural reform and other shifts in Japan’s political economy.

Link to publisher’s website:
https://utorontopress.com/us/harvesting-state-support-3

Hanno Jentzsch, a former doctoral student at the Junior Training Group 1613 Risk and East Asia at the IN-EAST, is now Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies / Japanese Studies, University of Vienna.