Rieu, Alain-Marc

Japan

Japan was the first nation in the mid-1990s to respond to a systemic crisis by the design and implementation of a long-term and large-scale science and technology policy. The goal was to generate innovation in order to create new epistemic conditions of economic growth and social progress. Most industrial nations have since then developed similar policies with the goal to overcome a “long-term recession”. In Japan, this policy led to successive Basic plans for science and technology policy; the last one, the 5th, was launched on January 2016. In March 11, 2011, Japan was confronted with another massive disruptive event, the Fukushima catastrophe. The source of the catastrophe was a giant earthquake and tsunami. The problem is to analyze how a large-scale research and innovation policy responds to a disruption, which has for origin the networks of political and economic power, which brought together the conditions of the catastrophe. Because the population has lost trust in government and the state apparatus, economic policies to overcome stagnation remain inefficient. The problem is to examine how a large-scale research and innovation policy can internalize such context and build the conditions of its performance. Comparing the successive plans and their different objectives shows how this problem was addressed but also denied. The goal is to open research on a different type of research and innovation policy.