Resisting Nostalgic Developmentalism: (Re)Generative Commons As a New Nexus for Sustainability and Restorative Environmental Justice in Post-Disaster Japan

This presentation contributes to ongoing efforts in environmental sociology to theorize environmental justice in social settings of disaster restoration and rehabilitation. In particular, this presentation explores the notion of a (re)generative commons as a progressive nexus system linking social justice and environmental well-being. Amidst our efforts for recovery from the aftermath of a disaster, localized and structured systems of injustices begin to emerge. These injustices rise through a hiddenness and complexity, which mask or subsume the efforts of localities to shift out of disempowerment and deterioration in their own efforts at re-generating community and environmental well-being.

We firstly clarify that a political-economic framing of recovery underpinned by ‘nostalgic developmentalism’ engenders and exacerbates such negative cycles, which we most clearly encountered in the post 3.11 disaster sites in Japan. ‘Nostalgic developmentalism’ consists of collective and often selective memories embedded with successful infrastructure modernization experiences, especially in periods of economic boom and regarding improvements in living standards. This presentation offers ethnographic and archival methods, linked with discourse analysis in a case study of disputes over reconstructing tsunami prevention levees. It enables us to analyze historical reproduction processes of ‘nostalgic developmentalism,’ while inducing both structured injustices systems and deterioration of local biophysical, infrastructural, and socio-cultural environments.

Finally, this paper contributes to a growing body of research that engages how local community members encounter and counteract systems and narratives of developmentalist interventions. In particular, this paper engages human and ecosystem landscape functions as (re)generative commons, which offer people discursive spaces where they can acquire historical and multi-cognitive perspectives, which in turn engender positive dialogues that fertilize and cultivate forms of socio-cultural capital and reciprocity networks among local social actors. Most importantly, a (re)generative commons can engender restorative environmental justice, which can produce practices as a nexus for achieving just and sustainable local communities.