Emi Ichiyanagi

Ph.D. Title: Citizens and Experts in Energy Transition Policy Making in Germany and Japan

Emi Ichiyanagi was a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies at Kyoto University in Japan. Her dissertation is funded by a scholarship from the Reiner Lemoine Foundation in co-operation with the Technical University of Munich. Her research interests lie in the field of deliberative democracy and citizen participation, particularly in the context of energy policy processes in Germany and Japan. For her dissertation, she completed research stays at the Technical University of Munich with the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

In her work, she analyses the roles of citizens and experts in the political decision-making processes of the energy transition in Germany and Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disasters in 2011, with a particular focus on innovative forms of citizen participation such as deliberative mini-publics, in which randomly selected citizens are involved in national energy policy processes. The aim of this research is to investigate which approaches to participatory governance and what kind of citizen-expert relationship leads to deliberative and democratic policy-making processes.

She completed the Master's programme "Public and Corporate Environmental Management" at the Free University of Berlin with a focus on environmental policy and environmental law. She wrote her master's thesis on "The role of the media in energy policy after Fukushima: A comparison between Germany and Japan". As a research assistant, first at the Renewable Energy Institute in Tokyo and then at Nagoya University in Japan, she worked on international research projects on the energy transition in Germany and Japan.