Environmental cooperation of Northeast Asia: transboundary air pollution

The puzzle of why Northeast Asian countries do not have any environmental cooperation comparable to Europe's successful regulatory regime even though both regions have borne similar conditions of the atmospheric problem has been explored. In order to answer this question, the author shed light on some of the conditions in Northeast Asia that would be necessary for regional cooperation to take place, by examining the factors that shape the environmental foreign policy of sovereign states. The success of Europe's regional cooperation in dealing with acid rain has been investigated, through the lens of interest-based and epistemic community approaches. The interest-based approach provides two factors - ecological vulnerability and economic cost - to show why some countries have taken more active positions than others. In addition, the author argues that one more factor is necessary, the existence of an epistemic community, out of the knowledge-based community perspective, because even self-interested states have difficulties in defining their interests due to high uncertainty and complexity about developing goals and preferences. After applying the two perspectives to the cooperation of Northeast Asian countries, it is found that lack of domestic and regional consensus on ecological vulnerability to transboundary acid deposition and the high economic costs of reducing emission have contributed to slow development of the cooperation of Northeast Asia. In addition, the lack of solid expert communities in Japan, as a leading country, could hinder Northeast Asian countries from speeding up the transition toward regulatory regime formation from the current information sharing cooperation.