External factors such as Chinese competition for material resources and increasingly direct competition with South Korea for export markets necessitate government-driven technological innovation to reduce reliance on external resources. However, these state-led initiatives are often contradictory, slow, hazardous, and costly relative to the agile, rapid, and market-based technologies that are created to fulfill immediate social demands for goods and services and which have historically been Japan's competitive edge in global trade. Moreover, Japan's ability to implement high technology strategies that rely on imported materials such as rare earth minerals is potentially vulnerable to the loss of external suppliers (especially from China), which Minato noted is a "cross-national linkage" between energy, climate, and urban insecurity in Japan. Consequently, Japan and South Korea (which faces a similar constraint) may both need to develop new technologies that are not reliant on such minerals.

With regard to energy-driven urban insecurity, Kae Takase described the continuing difficulties faced by government and industry in making nuclear spent fuel reprocessing a viable energy strategy in Japan. She contrasted this with the adoption of a feed-in-tariff that could stimulate rapid growth in photovoltaic cell-distributed electricity production and achieve Japan's goals of reduced greenhouse gas emissions if combined with a "minimum" nuclear power pathway in Japan.81 She suggested a shift from conventional to "comprehensive" energy security policy that would capture the full complexity of the energy security issue in Japan, and by implication, in other countries.

In Japan, where the basic minimum needs of most people are already met, a key driver of policy is how people think: that is, the basic paradigms that drive behavior at all levels. Tetsunari Iida suggested that in the energy field, the basic shift is transforming renewable energy from a fractional wedge on the "carbon flatland" to 100 percent (when combined with stringent end use efficiency) of the energy supply in a "renewable revolution."82

80 Takayuki, M., "Urban Security," in *Interconnections of Global Problems in East Asia, Green Economy, Urban Security And Energy Security* (Seoul: Nautilus Institute, 2010).

81 Takase, K., "Energy Security in Japan," in *Interconnections of Global Problems in East Asia, Green Economy, Urban Security And Energy Security* (Seoul: Nautilus Institute, 2010).

82 Iida, T., "Changing Climate Change & Energy Policy and Politics in Japan," in *Interconnections of Global Problems in East Asia, Green Economy, Urban Security And Energy Security* (Seoul: Nautilus Institute, 2010).

In his proposed "breakthrough" strategy, Iida relied primarily on local initiatives and market response to demand to drive change at the political and policy levels, but remained open not only to networking globally while acting locally, but also to cross-country, long-distance, and high-tech imports of renewable energy. Although the equity issues involved in one such project have yet to be analyzed, he referred to the "Gobitec" concept whereby solar, thermal, and other renewable sources of power generation could be undertaken in Mongolia and exported via long-distance, highvoltage, and direct-current transmission lines that would traverse China and/or Russia *en route* to the DPRK, ROK, and Japan.83 This vision would stimulate development and local employment, create value where little currently exists in the Gobi desert, and build economic and energy interdependence between the countries of the region.

As with other regional energy networks that would traverse the DPRK (such as electric tie lines connecting the ROK and Russian Far East grids, or natural gas pipelines from Russia to the ROK), the Gobitec concept requires the resolution of the DPRK nuclear issue and the opening of the DPRK to be plausible. As a multi-billion-dollar, high-tech solution-strategy that would likely be championed by states and corporations, this top-down concept is the antithesis of the community-level strategies described by Sanghun Lee such as the bottom-up "green apartment" movement in Gwangju, South Korea, which aims to change community attitudes and consumption patterns in fundamental ways.

Many of the ideological and institutional barriers to implementing the strategies described by Takase and Iida were shattered by the March 2011 tsunami and the ensuing Fukushima catastrophe. The resulting networked strategies to realize post-Fukushima reconstruction and develop greater resilience are described in chapter 3. What is evident in Japan is that in a fully market-driven society, the linkages between climate, energy, and urban insecurity arise more from the devolved actions of very large numbers of individual, household, and corporate players and less from the policies and interventions of state-based agencies (as in South Korea or China). Ideational influences are important in all three countries, but are particularly potent in Japan, and in different ways than in China or South Korea, in part due to the different roles and institutional locations of scholars, mass media, and civil society organizations relative to state agencies and policy formation in each country.

83 The Gobitec Initiative led by the Hanns Seidel Foundation is described at: http://www. gobitec.org/

It is evident from the preceding section that it is not simple to determine the linkages between global problems such as energy, climate, or urban insecurity in East Asia, or even to create a common understanding of what constitutes these problems, let alone their linkages. A first step in each country to resolving shared global problems requires that the problem be decomposed into its separate drivers and constituent parts, with a focus on those elements that originate in or affect the East Asian region.

Separately, national researchers need to undertake substantial empirical research into the nature of the problem and solution in each country. Then they can attempt a joint mapping of the "complexity terrain" to see if a common core exists in the divergent views of these constituent elements of the problem and its solutions, and if this common core in turn provides a nexus that bridges the causes or the solutions between these problems across cultures. This distillation is necessary before a realistic appraisal of the potential for concerted action can even begin.

Before we commence this task (to which the bulk of this book is devoted), we must first drill deeper into the concept of complexity to ascertain whether civil society organizations and networks are able to provide unique insight into these linked problems. And, if so, we must ask what they are capable of doing to facilitate collaborative action to address these problems, within and across countries of the region.

## Defining Complexity

When we say something is complex, we refer intuitively to the quality of a system's interconnectedness, the relation between parts that makes it so complicated or intricate that it is difficult to comprehend. Although there is no authoritative definition, a "complex system" has acquired a conventional modern meaning in English as one in which:

initial conditions, changes that are amplified by the non-linear nature of interaction between constituent elements of the system resulting in chaotic outcomes over time, often called the "butterfly effect;" and

e. The impacts of small changes at one scale of the system may affect another scale rapidly, unpredictably, and structurally — a moment sometimes called a tipping point.84

These characteristics contrast with those observed in "simple systems" (see Table 2.3).

#### **Table 2.3: Characteristics of Simple and Complex Systems**

*Source:* N.E. Harrison, "Thinking About the World We Make," in *Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm*, ed. by Harrison, N.E. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 3.

In ecological and human systems, such system-level transformations may be irreversible, and a system may become "stably unstable" and oscillate

84 See Baranger, M., *Chaos, Complexity, and Entropy. A Physics Talk for Non-Physicists* (Cambridge: New England Complex Systems Institute, 2001).

around a point of equilibrium for a long time due to multiple negative feedbacks that discourage change. Sometimes, an apparently random small event perturbs the system so much, due to multiple positive feedback loops, that it transforms the system itself. Studies of complex systems have been undertaken in many disciplines including climate science, mathematics, ecology, biology, and even in fields as far from the natural sciences as the study of organizational behavior, markets, archaeology, interstate relations, land use management, diplomatic negotiations, and security dynamics.85

Today, there are two basic methods for approaching complexity. One method made popular during and after the Cold War is to use models that attempt to simulate the whole system by defining state variables and the algorithms whereby these variables affect each other via defined pathways. A good example of this approach was the famous *Limits to Growth* report of the Club of Rome. These deterministic models often led to policy decisions that generated highly undesirable outcomes and a false sense of understanding and control.86

A second approach, which emerged in the 1980s, is to model each agent that exists in a system rather than the system itself. One then uses computer models to allow the agents to interact based on rules of environmental perception, recognition, decision-making, and learning over time.87 Based on multiple — sometimes thousands — of model runs, recognizable patterns emerge from the interactions of large numbers of agents. These outcomes can provide insight into the determining variables, the sensitivity of outcomes to initial conditions, and the counter-intuitive outcomes that can occur in aggregate outcomes. Agent-based models are attractive in that they highlight how the heterogeneity of the agents affects their interaction with each other and their environment. Moreover, there is no presumption as to the system-level outcomes. These just happen, deriving from the defining characteristics of the agent. Intuitively and appropriately, human behavior is treated as a complex system, especially if it involves some kind of spatial or social diffusion process including large numbers of people.

85 See, for example, Cumming, G.S. and Norberg, J., *Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future*, Complexity in Ecological Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

86 See, for example, Bracken, P.J., *The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

87 Berry, B.J.L., *et al.*, "Adaptive Agents, Intelligence, and Emergent Human Organization: Capturing Complexity through Agent-Based Modeling," *Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences,*99(Suppl 3) (2002), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.092078899

The concept of complexity can be applied to any system, natural or artificial. As defined above, global problems result from the failure of natural and artificial systems to fulfil human goals. Today, the quantity, universality, and intensity of many human problems make them global and therefore common to all humanity. The increased rate and magnitude with which complex, interrelated global problems confront us demands a correspondingly increased social differentiation and specialization to manage and resolve multiple challenges at the same time. In short, as we will see below, complex problems demand complex solutions, and complex strategies required by complex solutions entail increasingly complex organizations, which often fail in spite of their extra effort.

## Complexity in Urban Security and Sustainability

Complexity theory originated partly from efforts to understand ecological systems such as interdependent predator-prey dynamics; species and food webs; the relationship of diversity, especially biodiversity, to ecosystem resilience; and social-ecological interactions and system thresholds in the context of adaptive management.88 Since the late 1960s, the understanding that humans affect the biosphere has increased dramatically, starting with the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 and leading to scores of multilateral environmental accords, as well as the attempt to preserve, conserve, and restore global environmental assets and services upon which humanity depends for its very existence. Arguably, the rising costs of damages to environmental services, which in turn lead to a non-sustainable economy, have derived from increasingly complex ecological dynamics in the biosphere.89

Of these efforts, four "overarching" global environmental agreements have played prominent parts in East Asia sustainability agendas, both diplomatically and domestically. These are the conventions and protocols relating to ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity, and regional

88 See Levin, S., "Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems," *Ecosystems*, 1(5) (1998), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s100219900037; Holling, C.S., "Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems," *Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics*, 4(1) (1973), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245; Walker, B. and Meyeres, J., "Thresholds in Ecological and Social-Ecological Systems: A Developing Database," *Ecology and Society*, 9(3) (2004).

89 Fisk, D.J. and Kerhervé, J., "Complexity as a Cause of Unsustainability," *Ecological Complexity*, 3(4) (2006), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2007.02.007

oceans management. At regional and sub-regional levels, multilateral, government-funded dialogues and bilateral activities on acid rain, yellow sand, marine pollution, persistent organic pollutants, and biodiversity have also occurred.90 By the first decade of the 21st century, environmental issues had become sufficiently "hot" in the region to be recognized by scholars as security concerns.91

These transboundary and global sustainability problems intersect with the emergent pattern of massive urban growth in this region. The developing urban corridor also poses an immense challenge for the preservation of biodiversity. As we shall see, local governments and civil society organizations have begun to tackle the issues arising from this rapidly evolving "sustainability complexity" in East Asia.

## BeSeTo: An Emerging Northeast Asian Giga-City?

One of the most important patterns that emerged in the shift from a simple to a complex international system in Northeast Asia is the growth of urban corridors that now stretch across the region. This conurbation is neither planned nor controlled by any city or state. Yet it is the backbone of a tiger that cities and states will have to ride into the future. One obvious question is what new insecurities will arise from its proximity to the coastal zone, given climate change impacts?

Underlying these networked strategies, countervailing organizations and entrenched habits are uncontrolled, incremental expansion of cities and rapid connectivity (Internet and cell phones, fast trains, airplanes, etc.). This combination creates a set of linked, contiguous mega-cities, sometimes called mega-regions: organic entities that are more than the sum of their parts. This urban system includes horizontally-linked hinterlands (often called "rurbanization,"92 a hybrid rural-urban development also called

90 For the early period of these regional dialogues, see Hayes, P. and Zarsky, L., "Environmental Issues and Regimes in Northeast Asia," *International Environmental Affairs*, 6(4) (1994).

91 See Schreurs, M.A. and Hyun, I., *The Environmental Dimension of Asian Security : Conflict and Cooperation over Energy, Resources, and Pollution* (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007).

92 This phrase is used partly to refer to reversal of net migration from rural to urban areas; and also widely in India to refer to the combination and infusion of traditional rural

"*desakota*" in poor countries,93 referring to *in-situ* urbanization in rural areas driven by access to and demand from the globalized economy, on the one hand, and poverty-driven workforces desperate to generate income without moving to the city on the other — a process previously identified in Indonesia and now well underway in China)94 and huge vertical, compact multi-function poleis that would serve aging populations in wealthy portions of the mega-region with super-efficient technology for healthcare, mobility, communications, schooling, and entertainment.

The emergence of this connected, contiguous, and interdependent set of mega-cities may accelerate if the DPRK opens up to trade and investment in the next decade, with huge impacts on energy and climate change risks in the region as a whole. Thus, urbanization and its underlying social, economic, and technological linkages reconnect in turn to the security and nuclear weapons issues posed by the conflict between the DPRK and the United States, on the one hand, and by unresolved inter-Korean issues on the other. The latter issues constitute a powerful mix of risks that is potent enough to register as a global risk in its own right in the WEF framework.

The BeSeTo (Beijing-Seoul-Tokyo) urban corridor concept came to international prominence in a 1996 United Nations University study by Sang-Chuel Choe. 95 In 1994, it already included 98 million urban dwellers living in 112 cities, each populated by 200,000 or more people, across 1,500 km. Today, this system has grown substantially. By 2050, it could become the world's first giga-city: an agglomeration inhabited by a billion people and crossing four countries.

practices with urban amenities and facilities, in a hybrid and transformational manner in the rural landscape. See Modi, N., "Introduction to Rurban and Rurbanisation," in *Panel Discussion on Rurbanisation* (Ahmedabad, 2011).

93 "The *desakota* phenomenon encompasses more than the term "peri-urban." It refers to closely interlinked rural/urban livelihoods, communication, transport and economic systems. *Desakota* systems occupy, and radiate out from a spectrum of conditions that have purely urban and purely rural as the two extreme ends. In this emerging system, large sections of the population operate a mixed household economy that straddles the urban and the rural, as well as the formal and informal sectors." Moench, M. and Gyawali, D., *Desakota: Reinterpreting the Urban-Rural Continuum* (Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation, 2008).

94 Xie, Y., *et al.*, *Simulating Emergent Urban Form: Desakota in China* (London: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, 2005).

95 Choe, S.C., "The Evolving Urban System in North-East Asia," in *Emerging World Cities in Pacific Asia*, ed. by Yeung, Y. and Lo, F. (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1996).

Although the core concept was already circulating,96 Choe himself began to promote it as early as 1991.97 Indeed, in 1995, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo signed a memorandum of understanding which set the pace for inter-city cooperative relations, including all types of relations at both public and private levels. Hieyeon Keum explains that

In 1993, the Mayor of Seoul (Lee Won-Chong) proposed that city governments take concrete steps towards inter-city cooperation at a conference in Beijing. The mayors of Beijing (Li Qiyan) and Tokyo (Suzuki) agreed to the proposal. The expression of interest by the three capital cities' mayors in Beijing was followed up in April 1994 by an international conference in Seoul to explore the scope of and approaches to cooperation. In March 1995, the three mayors met in Seoul to sign the "Memorandum on BeSeTo Cooperation." The Memorandum stated a consensus among the three capital city administrations over the necessity of further three-way cooperation as well as a working principle of trust and faith in each other. In addition, the Memorandum pledged to involve the private and non-political sectors (such as cultural, academic, and athletic exchanges) in the cooperative framework as well. More specifically, the Second Memorandum identified four sectors for cooperation and exchange among the three mega-cities: economy, urban management, science and technology, and culture and the environment. The framework envisioned a three phase development trajectory of inter-capitalcity cooperation. The first stage (1995-1997) was going to be one of further exchange of ideas and agenda setting. Indeed, a series of discussions on specific cooperation and exchanges were held. The second phase (1998-2000) would involve exchanges of scholars for more discussions; development of new tourist routes; formation of joint ventures; and frequent exchanges among city officials. However, except for several cultural exchanges and administrative meetings, there has not been discussion on specific areas and issues for cooperation and exchanges. The third phase (2000-2005) was going to be a period of consolidation, leading to an institutionalization of the envisioned cooperative scheme. With the help of their respective national governments, the three capital cities were supposed to coordinate the construction of an information highway to remove the obstacles to communication. The highest stage of the BeSeTo cooperative scheme was

96 See Seoul Development Institute and Seou1 21st Century Research Center, *Building the BESETO Cooperation System* (Seoul Development Institute and Seou1 21st Century Research Center, 1995); Han, Y.J., *The Necessity and Role of a Cooperative System among the Northeast Asian Mega-Cities; the Future of Northeast Asian Mega-Cities* (Seoul: Seoul Development Institute, 1994); Jung, H.Y., *Seoul-toward a Regional Hub City in the Northeast Asia* (Seoul: Seoul Development Institute, 2005); Choe, S.C., *Status and Role of Seoul for the 21st Century* (Seoul: Seoul Development Institute, 1994).

97 Keum, H., "Globalization and Inter-City Cooperation in Northeast Asia," *East Asia*, 18 (2) (2000), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12140-000-0029-y

going to be the establishment of a permanent organization to coordinate and facilitate the cooperation in the four areas listed in the Memorandum.98

However, in the same year, the Seoul-led effort to stimulate collaboration between Beijing, Seoul, and Metro-Tokyo fell afoul of bureaucratic politics, and the new Mayor (elected in 1994) paid more attention to local issues with greater political payoff. Moreover, the private sector was not involved in these early dialogues.99 Keum blames the lack of coordinated effort by the central and municipal governments to orchestrate the necessary private involvement to realize this vision.100

Furthermore, the extent of economic complementarity as opposed to competitiveness between the three mega-cities was unclear. Without a champion, the BeSeTo concept could not overcome other powerful obstacles, namely the deepening power rivalry within the region and nuclear proliferation, especially in North Korea. 101 Keum concludes, "At the present stage, the BeSeTo scheme remains more of a concept than a reality. In view of the political-economic complexities at the national and regional levels, the most practical step to follow is to build a BeSeTo urban information network."102

However, the probabilities were always stacked against a scheme based on the collaborative strategies of three capital cities, given their different economic locations in national hierarchies and global networks of trade, finance, and investment. Regional urban corridors do not emerge through top-down planning. Rather, they emerge from the uneven processes of globalization that promote rapid urbanization and de-urbanization, shifts in production location due to relative factor endowment and comparative advantage, and changes in policy environment at the local and city level. Thus, the detailed study of the Shenyang-Yanbian section of the BeSeTo corridor, by Michael Wang and Guoping Lih, found that globalization had fragmented the corridor, causing shifts from Shenyang to Yanbian in competitive conditions, domestic reform of state-owned enterprises, and changing economic conditions in relation to international markets.103

98 Ibid., pp. 109-10.

99 Ibid., p. 99.

100 Ibid., p. 111.

101 Ibid., p. 112.

102 Ibid., p. 113.

103 Wang, M. and Li, G., "The Shenyang-Dalian Mega-Urban Region in Transition," *International Development Planning Review*, 30(1) (2008), doi: http://liverpool.metapress. com/content/l03530t8627u023t/?genre=article&id=doi%3a10.3828%2fidpr.30.1.1

Overall, the authors concluded that the corridor is now characterized by "increasing divergence in the economic growth of the two urban poles of this corridor and a breakdown in rural-urban integration in the region."104 Much of the previous rural-industrial development had been driven by contracts by big urban state-owned enterprises entered into with town- or village-level enterprises. As the former shut down, the latter followed suit.

Nonetheless, some areas around Dalian have shot ahead, and the overall result is fragmentation of the corridor in some areas and rapid integration in others. A similar story can be told with respect to the Nampo-Pyongyang, Incheon-Seoul, and other major urban corridors that collectively constitute the network of cities in the BeSeTo space.

According to Chinese analysts, a major problem with the BeSeTo concept is that Liaoning Province and even Beijing itself are in many ways lagging far behind the coastal cities stretching south. In their view, a giga-city is far more likely to emerge in the area from Beijing to the Tianjin-Binhai zone, from Shanghai to Hong Kong and beyond, than merely from Beijing to Tokyo.105

Interestingly, Professor Choe still suggests that the BeSeTo concept may be emerging as quickly as other regional corridors.106 However, until the DPRK stops impeding the regional completion of dynamic networks currently blocked by its rejection of an open economy — which include road and rail transportation, telecom, pipelines, power grids, and, above all, labor mobility — the full potential vigor and likelihood that a completely interconnected BeSeTo corridor in China will emerge cannot be determined. Meanwhile, it will continue to evolve in stop-start, disconnected, and disjointed ways — exactly how most mega-urban corridors develop.

Moreover, the concept is still in motion at the policy level. In 2006, for example, three research institutes conducted a joint three-year review of the BeSeTo concept. It was led by Japan's National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA) — the Korean and Chinese partners were the Korean Research Institute for Human Settlements and the National Development

104 Ibid.

105 Chen, X. and Liu, C., "The Reluctant Powerful Participant: China on, in, and out of the Pan-Yellow Sea Rim," in *2010 Presidential Committee on Regional Development International Conference* (Jeju, 2010).

106 Choe, S.C., "Incheon City-Region in Korea: Gateway to Northeast Asia — Aspiring to Be an Innovative and Learning Region," in *2nd International Conference on the Process of Innovation and Learning in Dynamic City-Region* (Bangalore: United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2005).

and Reform Commission/ISPRE — as part of a NIRA project on "Research on a Grand Design for Northeast Asia." The project undertook:

In concrete terms, (1) detailed examination of the construction of networks of individual transportation modes, such as conceptualization of a high-speed rail system for Northeast Asia in the near future, an expressway network including the Asia Highway, and a daily roundtrip air shuttle system linking the three cities and related major cities; (2) examination of the concept of inter-modal networks; and (3) sketching an overview of the construction of an intergovernmental platform for economic relations in Northeast Asia.107

In March 2007, this group published the joint *Proposal for Promotion of the Realization of the BeSeTo Corridor Vision — Toward sustained development in the Northeast Asia Region*. 108 Although they recognized the numerous impediments to the realization of this vision, including problems of energy, transport, logistics, and urban infrastructure, they argued that

The BeSeTo corridor is a linear representation of urban agglomerations in C-J-K [sic]. It contains major centers of talents and innovation, financial and industrial capital, and manufacturing and advanced services. The corridor, if equipped with less institutional barriers and a smoothly functioning transport system, would certainly contribute to building a more or less homogenized economic space wherein agglomeration benefits can be spread to enterprises and people.109

"Three things," they suggested, "are essential for building the BeSeTo corridor. They are transport corridors, information highways, and intercity networks. Without doubt, these three elements are complementary to each other and thus constitute building blocks of the BeSeTo corridor."110 Specifically, they argued that collaborative steps can be taken to circumvent the DPRK obstacle by implementing inter-modal roll-on, roll-off train and road freight systems that load onto and off ferries between Incheon and Yantai, alongside an improved Busan-Fukuoka train-ferry system.111 Achieving this efficiency would entail standardizing rail gauges and freight sizes, adopting a common headless-chassis for containers, and

107 Gangzhe, L., *Research Trends: Research on a Grand Design for Northeast Asia* (Tokyo: National Institute for Research Advancement, 2006).

108 China Institute of Spatial Planning & Regional Economy, *et al.*, *Proposal for Promotion of the Realization of the BESETO Corridor Vision-- toward Sustained Development in the Northeast Asia Region* (Tokyo: National Institute for Research Advancement, 2007).

109 Ibid., p. 24.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid., p. 28.

harmonizing customs clearance procedures.112 The group also suggested creating a "Northeast Asia Sky Corridor," an inter-city shuttle service that would also entail issuing a fast-visa for passengers using this service.113

Finally, they promoted a variety of inter-city networking and mutual learning activities. These would involve not only the three capital cities, but would expand the sub-regional inter-city networks on the rims of the Yellow Sea and the East Sea/Sea of Japan, such as the Organization for the Northeast Asia Economic Development, the Association of Northeast Asia Regional Governments, and the Conference of Major Cities in the East Sea/Sea of Japan Rim Region.114 Along these lines, they also called for "active and positive participation" by the citizen sector. "The traditional exchange mode, which is regional government-centered with supports by local business groups and academics such as local universities and think-tanks, should be improved to the mode with participation of a broader civic sector. Getting this participation of the civic sector will widen and enhance the foundation of inter-city network."115 Perhaps the most important single recommendation is the establishment of a virtual "BeSeTo Knowledge Corridor" whereby collaborative scholarly and policy research could be undertaken on both this concept and related issues by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese researchers.116 This would ultimately lead to a virtual transnational civil society, especially in areas of environmental and tourism cooperation.117

Sceptics may see this study as yet another example of Japanese "big think," a product of a construction state in an endless search for taxpayer funds to finance massive public infrastructure markets. Indeed, behind the study lay NIRA's previous work on a "Big Loop" vision that called for a circular high-speed railway to connect major cities in Northeast Asia plus a high-speed railway system to connect the "Big Loop" to the Shinkansen bullet train networks. Also in the background was NIRA's "New Cross" vision to connect the existing main north-south transport artery in Northeast Asia with the emerging inner Mongolia-Northeast Asia, east-west traffic route, linked by sea and air to Japan.118

117 Ibid., p. 38.

112 Ibid., p. 29.

113 Ibid., p. 30.

114 Ibid., p. 35.

115 Ibid., p. 36.

116 Ibid., p. 37.

118 Mori, N., "A Grand Design for Northeast Asia," in *15th Northeast Asia Economic Forum* (Khabarovsk, 2006).

Nonetheless, nearly two decades of conceptual work, extensive inter-city investigation, the uneven but inexorable process of massive urbanization and sprawl, *in-situ* rural industrialization and urbanization, integration of transportation systems, and above all, increasing movement of people within the region, suggest that, in one form or another, a BeSeTo corridor will emerge over the next fifty years. Indeed, some analysts have already added Shanghai to "BeSeTo" to make "BESHTOSHA": the emerging megacorridor along the east Chinese coast to the BeSeTo corridor.119 Whatever its final form — and remote sensing data already offers evidence of the emergence of this corridor120 — when the world's first giga-city emerges, it will present entirely new challenges of urban insecurity that, in turn, will require new forms of networked and trans-border urban governance.

## Complexity and Port City Climate Adaptation

According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission in Asia and the Pacific, the heads of ports from China, Japan, and South Korea have discussed the creation of a North-East Asian Transport Corridor. It would link East Asian ports with Europe by sea and land transport and enable the Northeast Asian countries to expand their international trade, especially Northeastern China. Major ports of call on the China-Japan route include Shanghai, Tianjin Qingdao, and Dalian in China and Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Moji, and Hakata in Japan. In part, these ports hope to avoid over-investment in facilities given the emerging level of need and competition for business while gaining from expanded regional flows of passengers and cargo that would be facilitiated by trans-border technical standards on power supplies, rail gauges, and road safety.121

Almost by definition, port cities are greatly at risk from climate change, particularly from rising sea levels, increasingly frequent and intense storms and related storm surges, and degradation of physical infrastructure, such as accelerated carbonation and chloride-induced corrosion of concrete and

119 Lee, S.J. and Kim, W.B., "Recent Trends of Cross-Border Cooperation and Spatial Strategies of the Northeast Asian Countries," in *Presidential Committee on Regional Development, 2010 International Conference* (Seoul, 2010).

120 Schneider, A., *et al.*, "A New Map of Global Urban Extent from MODIS Satellite Data," *Environmenal Research Letters*, 4 (2009), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044003

121 United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, "Subregional Cooperation for Shipping and Port Development in North-East Asia," in *Development of Shipping and Ports in North-East Asia* (New York: United Nations, 2005).

steel, due to increased atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide levels.122 These impacts will affect the operations of the already highly competitive port cities of East Asia, many of which have integrated into global shipping logistical and supply chains.123

As a result, smart port cities are already addressing these direct impacts on the physical infrastructure of their port facilities, as well as focusing on reducing the carbon footprint of existing operations (largely arising from container traffic and docking facilities for ships) and substituting low or zero emission vehicles and equipment for the existing greenhouse-gasemitting stock.124 Los Angeles is one leader in this respect, but there are many others, including some East Asian ports, that participate in the C40 network of cities cooperating to respond to climate change.125

Port cities contain vulnerable populations, especially those who live on the waterfront and who may gain little from the logistical operations by major production entities in the cities' manufacturing, mining, or agricultural hinterland. Worse, they may be displaced by port city expansion or heavily polluted by co-located industrial plants, especially petrochemical and energy generation facilities. Fishing communities also find their traditional homeport often dominated by major interests. Their coastal fishing operations may be further disrupted by a combination of runoff from watershed abuse and mismanagement, overfishing by industrial enterprises, and changes in fishing populations due to climate impacts on ocean temperature and circulation patterns.

In addition to these direct threats that undermine the physical and social resilience of port cities in the face of climate change, such cities are also subject to major geographic shifts of global competitive advantage in the production of globally traded and shipped fossil fuels, minerals, food, tourist cruise ships, and other bulk and high value goods that prove to be

122 Nicholls, R.J., *et al.*, *Ranking Port Cities with High Exposure and Vulnerability to Climate Extremes*, OECD Environment Directorate Working Paper (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).

123 Jacobs, W., *et al.*, "Integrating World Cities into Production Networks: The Case of Port Cities," *Global Networks*, 10(1) (2010), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471- 0374.2010.00276.x. and Ducruet, C. and Notteboom, T., "The Worldwide Maritime Network of Container Shipping: Spatial Structure and Regional Dynamics," *Global Networks*, 12(3) (2012), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2011.00355.x

124 Aerts, J., *et al.*, *Connecting Delta Cities, Coastal Cities, Flood Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change* (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2009).

125 C40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, "The World Ports Climate Declaration and Endorsement Ceremony: Declaration," in *C40 World Ports Climate Conference* (Rotterdam: C40 World Ports, 2008).

climate-sensitive. These factors in turn have multiple non-climate change drivers that are global, sectorial, and local. As Darryn McEvoy and Jane Mullett explain with reference to Australian port cities: "Volatility in markets, for example, increasing climate change impacts on agriculture both domestically and internationally, will also need to be factored into forward planning. Port planning needs to integrate land use, freight transport and environmental issues with consideration of multi-level governance perspectives at port, local, state and national levels."126

Thus, climate change amplifies the existing non-climate drivers of port city economic competitiveness or decline, and thereby superimposes new risks on top of the direct threats noted above. Some agile port cities will gain from this climate-driven shift in global production and trading patterns by adopting new, climate-friendly industries; they might become importexport centers for biofuels, as well as renewable energy generation from on-site or offshore, or possibly export hubs for captured carbon. Others, wedded to carbon-intensive processing, mechanical manufacturing, and logistical systems for bulky, carbon-intensive products such as fossil fuels, may lose market share whatever their locational advantage.127

Some major ports and their affiliated global shipping networks have already identified this shift, one driven by indirect climate change and which may affect port cities much earlier than, for instance, slowly rising sea levels.128 Thus, Rotterdam and affiliated global ports have created the global Rotterdam New World Alliance, redefining their primary role from industrial-era to climate-era port cities and creating integrated systems on common standards. The New World Alliance includes APL (Singapore), Mitsui OSK Lines (Japan), and Hyundai (South Korea). At a regional level, the European Union is developing new standards to promote climateresilient best practices via ESPO, the European Sea Ports Organization. A first step is to compile a global index of clean shipping operations for carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and sulfur compounds emitted by ships on the ocean and in port.129 A coalition of European port cities led by Antwerp,

126 McEvoy, D. and Mullett, J., *Enhancing the Resilience of Seaports to a Changing Climate: Research Synthesis and Implications for Policy and Practice* (Gold Coast: National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility and RMIT University, 2013).

127 Stenek, V., *et al.*, *Climate Risk and Business: Ports* (Washington, DC: International Finance Corporation, 2011).

128 Rynikiewicz, C., "European Port Cities as Gateways to a Green Economy?," *Network Industries Quarterly*, 13(4) (2011).

129 *Environmental Ship Index ESI* (World Ports Climate Initiative), http://esi.wpci.nl/Public/ Home.

Rotterdam, Le Havre, Bremen, and Hamburg has undertaken to create such an index.

With an eye on the horizon for the coming storm of climate changegenerated shifts in energy use, cities such as Antwerp have begun to implement strategies for becoming distribution hubs for already globallytraded biofuels such as ethanol, biomass pellets, palm oil, and agricultural residues. As algal biofuels become economically viable and major producers of this new liquid fuel use existing refined oil product storage and distribution systems, port cities may turn into "energy ports." Ports may also be well-situated for the direct transport of captured carbon for injection under the seabed or to other industrial and sequestration sites a scheme that is already in pilot stage at Rotterdam and foreshadows its future as a "carbon hub."130

In East Asia, this dynamic is already in play via the global shipping networks and the alliances of port city authorities and corporate terminal operators. The direct and indirect impacts of climate change on East Asian port cities such as Dalian, Nampo, Inchon, and Niigata will shape urban mega-regions along the East and Northeast Asian coastlines, with the threats and opportunities challenging each port city. Because the climate system is all-pervasive, climate change will affect every aspect of human life in the region. The adaptive responses will differ, and no-one can predict the bottom-up, networked patterns of adaptation that will make some cities resilient and leave others more vulnerable to climate-induced decline.

Fortunately, many of the measures that cities should take to withstand the accumulating impacts of climate change are similar to those needed to anticipate other catastrophic events such as tsunamis, pandemics, earthquakes, and even wars and terrorist attacks. In this regard, not only the central state (including the military) and major corporate sectors (especially the financial, insurance, and legal industries) need to prepare for climate change.131 Local governments, city agencies, and communities represented by civil society organizations also need to act autonomously and with strategies tailored to local circumstances, not least because many

130 Rotterdam Climate Initiative, *Port of Rotterdam CO2 Hub: Crucial Stepping Stone Towards Sustainable Economic Growth* (Rotterdam Climate Initiative, 2012).

131 Prasad, N., *et al.*, *Climate Resilient Cities: A Primer on Reducing Vulnerabilities to Disasters,* (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2009).

of the large, centralized institutions are likely to either implement old, brittle strategies or deliver too little change, too late, and at the wrong location.132

In this regard, complex networks, especially "live networks" using smart sensors and the latest social media communication devices, may enable first responders and communities to react in instantaneous swarms to catastrophic events far more efficiently than lumbering, slow, centralized agencies. In "cognitive cities," citizens equipped with smart phones become the mobile, omnipresent sensor agent for smart systems integrated across sectors.133 As Ali Mostashari *et al.* explain, citizens "become active data generators but also active consumers of urban information." The result will be far greater accountability and efficiency in urban governance: "The transparency that a cognitive city provides will put the burden of performance on the shoulders of urban service providers, but it will also result in more efficient and effective resource allocation decisions. This is a fundamental cultural shift — thereby making urban governance far more transparent."134

The need to retreat in the face of climate-driven disasters, to adjust course mid-way in the midst of crisis response, and to generate a distributed, autonomous response puts the onus on networked civil society organizations and local governments to prepare for the worst while embracing climate change as the key to building multipurpose resilience in port cities.

## Networked Inter-City Cooperation

Whatever its ultimate form, the sheer scale and complexity of the emerging giga-city in East Asia poses unprecedented challenges for regional security and sustainability. It will create new types of energy- and climate-related insecurity for urban areas along its corridor(s). It will require a new, crossborder form of urban governance that far surpasses the challenges of precursor "border cities" in this region.135 Here, we address how networks

132 Matthias, R. and Coelho, D., "Understanding and Managing the Complexity of Urban Systems under Climate Change," *Climate Policy*, 7(4) (2007), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.10 80/14693062.2007.9685659

133 Mostashari, A., *et al.*, "Cognitive Cities and Intelligent Urban Governance," *Network Industries Quarterly*, 13(3) (2009).

134 Ibid.

135 See studies of Russian-China border towns in Billé, F., *et al.*, *Frontier Encounters: Knowledge and Practice at the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian Border* (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012).

of cities propagate best practice in the emerging giga-city. We also explore how civil society organizations accelerate the process of inter-urban and cross-border learning and innovation on an issue-by-issue approach — and how states may facilitate (or block) this process.

How these networked processes will be affected by the emergent patterns and logic of the emerging "giga-ntic" urban corridor is as yet unexamined.136 That the corridor will superimpose its own properties, dynamics, and cellular structure on the component mega-cities, as well as on inter-urban cooperation and transnational civil society networks, is certain.

Kiho Yi suggests that inter-city networks in Northeast Asia already contribute to a nascent transnational "solution-strategy spiral." These inter-urban networks, often connecting secondary and coastal cities, include the Niigata-Vladivostok-Wonsan triangle, the Kita-Kyushu-Pusan-Jeju triangle, and a Seoul-Dalian-Shanghai triangle. To these we might also add the Busan-Fukuoka bilateral network.137

Yasuo Takao provides a set of documented case studies examining transnational inter-city networked cooperation on a range of economic, infrastructure, cultural exchange, human rights, and environmental projects between Japanese cities and their counterparts in China and the Russian Far East.138 For example, the cities of Dalian (China) and Kitakyushu (Japan) cooperated closely through 1996-2010 on the creation of a Dalian Environmental Model Zone, transferring the requisite pollution control technology and management practices.139 Takao explains:

The greatest potential for information dissemination lies in local government's expertise transfer to overseas counterparts. The Dalian-Kitakyushu "friendly" relationship that had been officially established in 1979 built up a high level of information exchange between the two cities.

136 See Douglass, M., "Toward Participatory Governance of Transborder Intercity Regions in Asia," in *Interventions in the Political Geography of Asia's Transborder Urban Networks: Working Paper Series 193*, ed. by Miller, M. A. and Bunnell, T. (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2012).

137 Park, S.H., "Post-Cold War Trans-Border Networks in Northeast Asia: The Busan-Fukuoka Network," in *Interventions in the Political Geography of Asia's Transborder Urban Networks: Working Paper Series 193*, ed. by Miller, M. A. and Bunnell, T. (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2012).

138 Takao, Y., "Transnational Coalitions in Northeast Asia: Search for a New Pathway of Japanese Local Government," *Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies*, 2 (2003).

139 Ibid., p. 82.

In the field of environmental issues, as early as 1981, Kitakyushu began to transfer the know-how of local planning and management to Dalian. From 1996 to 2000, Kitakyushu City in collaboration with the KITA conducted energy efficiency improvement projects. In 1998 environmental experts, engineers and city officials presented to Dalian through the KITA a set of 18 preventive environmental proposals including pickling/heat treatment process improvement in steel works, production conversion of sulfuric acid in a chemical plant, and nitration process improvement of chlorobenzene in a dye factory. In the same year, the KITA co-organized with the UN Centre for Regional Development a training seminar in Dalian to inform outcomes of the Model Zone project.140

The cooperation was not merely formal or contractor-based, but involved extensive participation by local business and grassroots groups, as well as increased public awareness in both cities.141 At both ends, local government officials were able to compel their national governments to support the project, putting political pressure on the Japanese aid agency to provide the requisite resources, eventually amounting to over \$300 million of investment in the Model Zone.142 Importantly, city officials from Kitakyushu were able to deal directly with Chinese central government officials without having to pass via Tokyo. This transnational network enabled the project to proceed quickly and with state blessing, but unencumbered by the normal bureaucracy. As Takao concludes, "In so doing, they [the city level leaders] brought together otherwise unconnected domestic actors in a manner that produced a transnational interest that had not existed before."143

Takao shows how the Niigata Prefecture played a similar role in establishing and hosting a regional acid rain training center in the city of Niigata:

In 1998 the Acid Deposition and Oxidant Research Center (ADORC) was established in Niigata. The ADORC started its activity as a branch of the nonprofit organization Japan Environmental Sanitation Center, which was located in Kawasaki. Since 1993, expert meetings on air pollution and acid deposition have been held by several East Asian countries, and in 1998 Niigata was designated as the interim network center for dissemination of monitoring data and other information to the participants.144

140 Ibid., p. 85.

141 Ibid., p. 87.

142 Ibid., pp. 98-99.

143 Ibid., p. 104.

144 Ibid., p. 84.

Having delved into the complex connections linking energy and urban insecurity and deriving from the bottom-up nature of urbanization in East Asia, we now turn to the relationship between complexity and geopolitical security issues in the region. In the course of doing so, we will discuss networked solution strategies that have been implemented by civil society networks to increase security and sustainability in East Asia.

## Complexity and Security

Orthodox, *realpolitik* accounts of international security assume the unitary nature of the key actors (states), the nature of the game that they play (balance of power), the anarchic nature of the international system, and the key determinant of outcomes in the competition for power and influence (military capacity). In the Cold War period, a relatively simple bipolar model of the international system dominated, at least in the West: the nuclear balance-of-terror stabilized the system through fear of mutual annihilation by the American and Soviet blocs.

In reality, these are theories that overlap considerably. From a theoretical perspective, the concept of security propagated by all of them suggests that the state system is closed, determinate, and rests ultimately on the attempt to exert top-down control over unruly social and political phenomena. Fear is the fundamental basis of security in this realist world, dominated by the means of coercion and destruction, and the main way to understand the relative power of states or the structure of the region is to examine both these means and the elite's perceptions of threats.145 The primary goal of the national security state is to maintain order. At the international level, the goal of great powers in a nuclear-armed world is to preserve the status quo, often termed "stability." Thus, one of the main security challenges in the region, the North Korean nuclear weapons program, is viewed as a threat to the existing balance of power. It threatens not only to rupture the regional order, a "punctuated equilibrium" in what was previously viewed to be a homeostatic system, but to herald the dawn of a new global nuclear era in which nuclear-armed rogue states and non-state actors disturb strategic stability.146

145 See, for example, Hassig, K.O., *Northeast Asian Strategic Security Environment Study* (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2001).

146 Wilson, P., "Does 'Strategic Stability' Have a Future in Northeast Asia?" in *Strategic Stability in a Turbulent World: SAIC Report of 5th Nuclear Stability Roundtable to Defense*

The constraints on independent behavior within this rigid, bipolar system became less effective with the reconstruction and rise of Japan and Europe. Consequently, new and less mechanistic theories emerged that reflected the shift in the underlying political-economy of American global hegemony. *Liberal institutionalism* proposed that states are able to cooperate even in a system without an overarching authority by concentrating on the norms, rules, and organizations that regulate and manage international affairs.147 A variant, *Gramscian hegemonic theory*, suggests that less powerful states not only defer to great powers, but also consent to their subordination; they should therefore share the ideology of common political, economic, and security interests that legitimates the leadership of an external great power. And finally, *state formation theory* argues that nuclear weapons are one of the ways in which state elites not only project threat against external adversaries, but also employ it to reinforce domestic control.148

Since the mid-nineties, a "complexity paradigm" has begun to challenge these traditional theories of the international system. In this view, there is no world or regional system of states, but only the macro-outcome aggregate results of the systematic interaction of large numbers of constituent agencies within and between states. The results of this interaction at any point in time are highly unpredictable. A further consequence of this view is that there is no homeostatic "balance-of-power" between states; rather, the power flux is always dynamic and never the same.149 As James Rosenau explains:

Even the most complex system can maintain long equilibrium before undergoing new adaptive transformations, or what complexity theorists call "phase transitions." Put differently, their progression through time can pass through periods of stasis or extremely slow, infinitesimal changes before lurching into a phase transition, thereby tracing a temporal path referred to as "punctuated equilibrium."150

*Threat Reduction Agency, Advanced Systems Concepts Office* (McLean: Science Applications International Corporation Strategies Group, 2003).

147 Mann, S.R., "Chaos Theory and Strategic Thought," *Parameters* (1992).

148 Tanter, R. and Hayes, P., "Beyond the Nuclear Umbrella: Re-Thinking the Theory and Practice of Nuclear Extended Deterrence in East Asia and the Pacific," *Pacific Focus*, 26 (1) (2011), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1976-5118.2011.01053.x

149 Harrison, N.E., "Thinking About the World We Make," in *Complexity in World Politics : Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm*, ed. by Harrison, N. E. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

150 Rosenau, J.N., "Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs," in *Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security*, ed. by Alberts, D. S. and Czerwinski, T. J. (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002).

As a defining case in point for our purposes, the rigid boundaries and spheres of American and Soviet Cold War influence fractured, splintered, and flew apart in 1991, and then re-aggregated in ways that were inconceivable a mere decade before. In the two decades since 1990, new states were founded at the net rate of 1.6 per year,151 and international non-governmental organizations and transnationally active corporations were created at an astonishing rate. Today, there are some 27,000 internationally active non-governmental organizations,152 63,000+ multinational corporations,153 and about 3,000 cities with over 100,000 people, plus another ~19,000 human settlements with populations between 5,000 and 100,000. Overall, therefore, there are roughly 110,000 leaders with global reach. (Good data are hard to come by, but according to C. van Marrewijk *et al*., there were about 2,957 cities with 100,000 or more people on Earth in the early 1990s.154 J. Vernon Henderson and H.G. Wang estimate that there were 2,684 cities with populations of at least 100,000 or more people in 2000.155 Yet another accounting states that there are currently about 21,905 urban areas each populated by more than 5,000 people, of which about 18,948 contain between 5,000 and 100,000 people).156

The leadership of many of these non-state entities conduct their own international activities across state borders. Clearly, a theory that concentrates on the dynamics of only 190 interacting states does not capture the full complexity of the international system today. One of the tenets of complexity theory is that as the number of agents and the degree of their freedom in a system increase, so the outcomes become increasingly difficult to predict. This happens because the agents in a complex system have agency — they must make decisions based on available information,

151 Net because some states flew apart (Yugoslavia into five states) and others unified (Germany, Yemen).

152 For INGOs, see Union of International Associations, *Yearbook of International Organizations 2012-2013: Geographical Index: A Country Directory of Secretariats and Memberships* (Boston: Brill, 2012).

153 For multinational corporations, see Gabel, M. and Bruner, H., *Global Inc: An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation* (New York: New York Press, 2003).

154 C. van Marrewijk, *et al.*, *International Economics* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) (data tables at: http://www2.econ.uu.nl/users/marrewijk/international/zipf.htm).

155 Henderson, J.V. and Wang, H.G., "Urbanization and City Growth: The Role of Institutions," *Regional Science and Urban Economics*, 37(3) (2007), doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2006.11.008

156 *Data Sets, Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project* (New York: SocioEconomic and Applications Data Center, Colombia University), http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/ data/collection/grump-v1/sets/browse

and these decisions are undetermined in advance because of the stochastic way that different types of agents interact over time.

Thus, in the post-Cold War period, when rigid division between two essentially closed, relatively simple systems of states collapsed into an open flux across borders, new and powerful players entered the field of cross-border relations within the East Asian region. Indeed, some agents — corporations, unions, civil society organizations such as development agencies or religious movements, diasporas, and sometimes even individuals — may cross over and act simultaneously in more than one open, complex system at a time (a state, a market, and a church, for example). Some may cross state borders and operate simultaneously in multiple state systems or in international commons under the jurisdiction of no state (like pirates on the ocean). Others may be transnational actors working at the same time at different levels and locations through networks and influential webs such as the virtual diasporas supporting irredentist movements,157 thus creating a kind of quantum politics. Neil Harrison calls such actors "meta-agents"158 because they are both agents at a lower, domestic scale of the larger international complex system and acted upon at the same time by other states in the international system, itself a dynamic complex system that is not controlled centrally and constitutes an openended, evolving structure.159

By this perspective, a state — a very large emergent system in its own right — adapts to other states, or constantly *co-evolves* with them to regenerate the international system of states. In this view, global or regional level interstate relations are not stable *per se* — an attribute that is often referred to as a positive value, the maintenance of which, by virtue of lending predictability to the outcomes of inter-state transactions, should guide the exercise of great power. Rather, the relationships between states are continuously reinvented and the "balance" between contending forces is always dynamic, a "fleeting embodiment" of the underlying deep organization of the domestic and international systems, never returning to the same equilibrium point. 160

157 *The Internet and International Systems: Information Technology and American Foreign Policy Decision-Making Workshop* (Berkeley: Nautilus Institute, 1999), http://oldsite.nautilus. org/gps/info-policy/workshop/papers/

158 Harrison, N.E. (2006), p. 8.

159 Ibid., p. 27.

160 Ibid.

# Complex Adaptive Systems and Networked Governance

The agents that constitute a complex state system — that is, individuals, civil society organizations, state bureaucracies, etc. — are all purposeful and able to learn and adjust their behavior in response to other agents and environmental factors. They may be able to change their behavior very quickly to adapt to external stress, and thereby lend resilience to the whole system — at least for a while. In doing so, they will often innovate and create new types of social agents, or differentiate those that exist to specialize in particular types of adjustment — as occurred, for example, when nuclear weapons were deployed, forcing whole new types of military organization and thinking to affect the traditional posture of military forces. Each of these kinds of innovation represents an increase in social complexity, or as Joseph Trainter puts it:

[Complexity] is a fundamental problem-solving tool. In its early phases, complexity can generate positive feedback and increasing returns. Confronted with challenges, we often respond by strategies such as developing more complex technologies, adding more elements to an institution (specialists, bureaucratic levels, controls, etc.), increasing organization or regulation of transactions, or gathering and processing more information. Each such action represents increasing complexity. Their effectiveness comes in part because changes in these dimensions can be enacted rapidly. While humans may be complexity-averse when we personally bear the cost, our problem-solving institutions can be powerful complexity generators. All that is needed for growth of complexity is a problem that requires it. Since problems always arise, complexity seems to grow inexorably. Since complexity is an adaptive problem-solving strategy that has costs, it can be viewed as an economic function. Societies invest in complexity.161

Unsurprisingly, complexity theory has been applied not only to the international system as a whole, as outlined above, but also to the realm of military security in the aftermath of the Cold War. Just as realist theories of the international system were mechanical in nature, so theories of war and military strategy in the industrial era were "Newtonian": that is, they posited that war was linear in nature, that its effects could be observed and predicted, and that military organization and warfighting itself were

161 Tainter, J.A., "Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability," *Population and Environment*, 22(1) (2000), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1006632214612

subject to effective centralized command and control from above. Today, war is viewed dynamically. As John Schmitt states:

War is fundamentally a far-from equilibrium, open, distributed, nonlinear dynamical system highly sensitive to initial conditions and characterized by entropy production/dissipation and complex, continuous feedback. Rather than thinking of war as a structure at equilibrium, we should think of it as a standing wave pattern of continuously fluxing matter, energy, and information.162

Like other social domains, Northeast Asia's militaries have faced a general shift from simple to complex environments, from simple to complex warfare. Instead of defined battlegrounds with distinct frontiers and dedicated forces, the military in each country faces diverse types of adversaries. (The exception is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, frozen in the 1950s on the northern side). Many possible adversaries for each military operate without central direction. They do not present fixed targets. Yaneer Bar-Yam argues that the military is particularly susceptible to the general law that an organization's repertoire of possible actions must be at least as complex as the challenge confronting it. As Bar-Yam argues, "In a high complexity environment, high complexity forces are more capable than low complexity ones. Thus, an effective analysis of warfighting capability must include both scale and complexity of the forces and the environment where the conflict occurs."163

The scale at which the military applies force becomes a critical issue because its practices must match the level of complexity of the countervailing military. "A force that is organized, trained and otherwise prepared to apply large scale force," he writes, "is not well suited to high complexity conflicts."

Similarly, a force that is designed for high complexity conflicts is not well suited to large scale conflicts. More generally, the complexity of a force's capabilities at each scale of a possible encounter is a key property that describes the abilities of that force. This, then, is the central basis for

162 Schmitt, J.F., "Command and (out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory," in *Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security*, ed. by Alberts, D. S. and Czerwinski, T. J. (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002); Rosenau, J.N. (2002), p. 37.

163 Bar-Yam, Y., *Complexity of Military Conflict: Multiscale Complex Systems Analysis of Littoral Warfare* (Cambridge: New England Complex Systems Institute, 2003).

evaluating the effectiveness of force design in the face of a specific complex military mission or conflict.164

As Trainter noted above, the argument that the complexity of organizations and problems must match to find solutions is a general proposition about the relationship between problem-solving organizations and the issues they tackle. As the number of complex global problems increases, so the level of social complexity must increase to solve these problems. This imperative creates a need for new forms of organization to fill the "complexity deficit," as we shall see below.

Perhaps the most intractable and profound security problem in the region is the divided Korean Peninsula. The North Korean nuclear threat is the only geopolitical global risk originating in East Asia that can be found among the WEF's top fifty global risks — in which the criterion is that a risk could impose a cost of more than \$10 billion dollars. Therefore, we will examine the evolution of the Korean Peninsula from a simple to complex security environment.

## Korea's Complex Regional Security Environment

The security environment of a small nation like Korea is especially complex, due in part to its division into North and South Korea, but also to the nature of great power relations. Five decades after the end of the Korean War, and two decades after the end of the Cold War, Korea remains trapped in a set of mutually reinforcing security dilemmas. These are partly driven by geopolitical circumstances in which great powers continue to exercise influence over the two Koreas. These external powers aim to realize their own interests in Korea by exercising diplomatic and military power in response to the DPRK's nuclear breakout, on the one hand, and by attempting to pursue their divergent interests with respect to the future of the Peninsula regarding territorial disputes, resource management, military deployments, and crisis management, etc., on the other.

In this manner, classic geopolitical concerns such as the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the maintenance of the reputation of United States as nuclear and global hegemon, Sino-Japanese hostility, Sino-US distrust and the Taiwan Straits issue, and the desire of Russia to participate in regional security and development schemes are all super-imposed on and shape the

164 Ibid., p. 4.

fundamental insecurity of Korea. This insecurity includes its division by war and the long standoff between its two halves. These external drivers over-determine inter-Korean relations and make it almost impossible to align the internal and external variables that influence progress or regress in those relations. When domestic Korean political and economic variables are added to the conflict equation, especially the isolated nature of the DPRK regime and the volatility of the ROK's democratic polity, it is almost certain that one or more of the critical external variables will be out of alignment at the brief moments when the two Koreas are able to accommodate each other. This makes periods of inter-Korean rapprochement short and virtually ensures their brutal, often abrupt termination and reversion to chronic conflict.

Thus, one could compare regional security problems to a classic sixsided Rubik's Cube with an additional layer of complexity arising from the domestic variables. As is well-known, the solution to the Rubik's Cube requires that each of the six faces — just as there are six states in East Asia — show only one color: each of these faces has nine cells, totaling fiftyfour independent externally-oriented variables. The combination of cells by permutation is enormous, and solving the Cube takes practice, skill, and knowledge of solution algorithms that exceed the ability of most people.

As Changrok Soh has observed, since the Cold War ended, nonstate actors have transformed what was a strict hierarchy of hegemonic state control into a "horizontal self-autonomous system" organized into networks composed of states and non-state actors. These diverse actors interact in transnational networks and contribute a new type of "networked governance" to the traditional, state-dominated system. This hybrid organizational innovation has been critical, for example, in developing a human rights regime in East Asia, and in creating a multilayered strategy to promote human security in the region.165

Such networks have inaugurated a loose web of multilateral dialogues and concerted activities in the East Asia region that supplement rather than supplant the dominance of existing states.166 Ha Young Sun has described this phase of international relations in East Asia as the "wolf spider"

165 Soh, C., "Enhancing Human Security in North Korea through Development of a Human Rights Regime in Asia," *Korea Review of International Studies*, 10(1) (2006).

166 Yeo, A., *Bilateralism, Multilateralism, and Institutional Change in Northeast Asia's Regional Security Architecture*, EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series (Seoul: East Asia Institute, 2011).

stage, in which great powers still hunt for prey, but also form complex, multi-sectoral networks of diplomatic, economic, cultural, and ecological interdependence built on a foundation of information and knowledge.167 Although it is small, South Korea is ahead of the pack in developing a networked strategy as a global actor, and may even lead China, still preoccupied with consolidating its economic development. North Korea lags far behind in this view, and to co-evolve with the other states without collapsing, to survive at all, it must introduce networked strategies.168 Moreover, it must integrate with South Korea at the same time or fall apart. Along the way, leaders in each country must become cosmopolitan and adopt multiple identities as national and regional citizens.169 Koreans face the extra challenge of adopting a triple identity as citizens of a divided nation, citizens of separate Korean states, and citizens of the East Asian region.170

Thus, in Ha's view, South Korea should develop its thickest, stickiest webs with the United States and Japan, but over time, he suggests its web of relationships with China will be equally important. From this perspective, it is particularly important that South Korea do everything possible to ensure that China and the United States do not tear apart their web of increasing interdependence; South Korea can play the role of network mediator (sometimes called a border-spanning role in network theory), using its information power and knowledge to weave together the American and Chinese webs.

South Korea should also find ways to work around the "structural holes" that exist in the Japanese and American webs with respect to North Korea — a state almost bereft of networks in the sense used here.171 South Korea, he avers, can use its network power to overcome its relative scarcity of resources in terms of size and military power, but not, he implies, if it continues to be distracted by petty competition with North Korea rather than forging joint strategies.172 In short, as he suggests, "The complex time of the twenty-first century calls for complex networks."173

167 Ha, Y.S., *Path to an Advanced North Korea by 2032: Building a Complex Networked State*, EAI Asia Security Initiative Working Paper (Seoul: East Asia Institute, 2011).

168 Ibid., p. 13.

169 Ibid.

170 Ibid., p. 14.

171 See Mansourov, A., *Bytes and Bullets: Information Technology Revolution and National Security on the Korean Peninsula* (Honolulu: Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2005).

172 Ha, Y.S. (2011).

173 Ibid.

Ha Young-sun's concept is controversial in South Korea, not the least because the Lee Myung-bak government funded his South Korean-Japan project in 2009, to develop a joint concept of Korean-Japanese future relationships, as part of Lee's "Global Korea" strategy. 174 In support of this strategy, it proposes to maximize the soft power and public diplomacy of a middle-sized power by creating networks that promote national goals.175 Others from the Ha study-group of complex diplomacy have suggested that South Korea implement a networked middle-power strategy to cope with the pressure placed on it by the US-China power transition in the region. Instead of having to choose between the United States and China, as Lee Sook-Jong states, South Korea should

pursue middle power diplomacy on global issues based on its Unites States support while staying away from some regional security issues that would invite US-China rivalry, such as the Taiwan issues and the South China Sea maritime disputes.176

The September 2011 opening of the China-Japan-Korea Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat in Seoul was the epitome to date of the pursuit of this complex networked statecraft at a regional level, while the convening of the 2010 Seoul G20 summit exemplified it at a global level.177

Ha and colleagues have not fully embraced the role of civil society in their concept of the "complex networked state," a polity in which civil society would not necessarily align with the goals of the nation state, but instead develop a cosmopolitan agenda that may counter rather than facilitate advances by the state. In part, Ha's state-focused concept reflects the relatively weak civil society sector in China, Japan, the two Koreas, and Russia. Nonetheless, civil society is in play in different and powerful ways within each society and across borders, even in North Korea. Civil society has already demonstrated its capacity to affect state agendas and to

174 "Korea-Japan Joint Research Project for New Era," *KBS World Radio*, 27 January 2009, http:// world.kbs.co.kr/english/archive/program/news\_zoom.htm?no=4709&current\_page=44

175 Sohn, Y., "Searching for a New Identity: Public Diplomacy Challenges of South Korea as a Middle Power" in *Opening New Horizons for Public Diplomacy and Culture in the 21st Century, 2012 Korean Association of International Studies-Korea Foundation International Conference* (Seoul: Korea Foundation, 2012); Sohn, Y., "Middle Powers' Like South Korea Can't Do without Soft Power and Network Power," *Global Asia*, 7(3) (2012).

176 Lee, S.J., *South Korea as New Middle Power Seeking Complex Diplomacy*, EAI Asia Security Initiative Working Paper (Seoul: East Asia Institute, 2012).

177 The history of the Secretariat: *Politics* (Seoul: Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat), http:// www.tcs-asia.org/dnb/board/list.php?board\_name=3\_1\_1\_politics

assert its own priorities in the region in different issue areas. We examine complex diplomacy in greater depth in chapter 6. We turn now to the role that networked civil society has already played in responding to global ecological problems in Northeast Asia, implementing its own foreign policies or "civic diplomacy" across national borders.

## Civil Society's Networked Search for Cooperative Solutions

In networked governance strategies, civil society actors have already contributed significantly to weaving the kinds of web espoused by Ha. They are particularly adept at creating networks that identify where global problems intersect, where solutions may jointly address more than one problem at a time, and where different linked problems might be tackled simultaneously to solve a common problem. In principle, civil society networks are also particularly suited for sensitive security tasks such as engaging North Korea, having the agility to forge relationships and deliver joint benefits quickly, without regard for the old "decision rules" adhered to by slow-moving, conservative bureaucracies.

Here we use networks to refer to structured patterns of communication and coordination originating with social actors who are not part of the state. As the degree to which the state encompasses social, economic, cultural, and even religious life varies in each society, so too does the relative autonomy and organizational capacity of civil society organizations originating in these spheres. Civil society organizations may reside primarily in the market or in the social sphere in all its diversity. The networks they spawn may incorporate actors from multiple sectors, including the state, provided the impetus is generated and maintained by civil society organizations. Their influence arises by virtue of their structural position. This is due either to their degree of connectedness, which enables them to increase the speed and quality of information flow across networks, thereby making the world smaller, or to their ability to fill structural "holes" between other networks by spanning borders or boundaries, thereby creating networks of networks enabling other organizations to communicate in ways otherwise thought impossible. The Nautilus Institute's NAPSNet information service, with readers in every country in the region and, often, contributors from the "community of readers," is the former case in point.178 "Track 2" dialogues such as the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue are the classic instance of the latter.179

Civil society actors are defined here not just with respect to the degree to which they are civilian, but also to the point to which they are committed to universally accepted values. John Keane argues that to the extent that civil society organizations realize the latter, they are truly part of "global civil society."180 Because many societies contest these values, what one society views as civilizing may be viewed negatively in another (gender-based rights, for example). Some "dark" non-state networks engage in activities that are arguably barbaric, such as human trafficking, drug or arms trading, or the propagation of international terrorism.

Thus, not all non-state networks are civil society networks as defined here, and some of these dark networks may contribute to the global problems that afflict the region.181 In this book, we have not sought out to illustrate this point, or to make a net assessment of the contribution of civil society and its diplomacy as described in subsequent chapters. There are plenty of failures to point to in which an uncivil society campaigned for socially and culturally regressive goals (historical revisionism and Japan's textbooks are described in chapter 6); and there are also many instances in which singleissue civil society groups caused more chaos by mis-specifying their goals, seeking to bring about an ill-conceived or poorly understood solution, or failing to implement it in a competent, sensitive manner. In this book, we try to understand how civil society and its agencies may succeed, not fail, and we recognize that much research remains to be done in relation to the activities of uncivil society and its agents, as well as the performance metrics and record of civil society in this region.

178 See Hayes, P., *et al.*, "The Impact of the Northeast Asian Peace and Security Network in US-DPRK Conflict Resolution," in *Internet and International Systems: Information Technology and American Foreign Policy Decision-making Workshop* (Berkeley: Nautilus Institute, 1999).

179 See *The Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue* (La Jolla: University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation), https://igcc.ucsd.edu/research-and-programs/ programs/regional-issues/northeast-asia/northeast-asia-cooperation-dialogue.html

180 Keane, J., *Global Civil Society?*, Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

181 Such as DPRK drug smuggling across the border to China. See Meng, L., "Study on Problem of Trans-Border Drugs Crimes on Sino-DPRK Border," *The Journal of Chinese People's Armed Police Force Academy*, 1 (2009).

To succeed, the leading agents in a networked complex adaptive system must have internal decision rules, the ability to learn from interaction with other agents and their environment, and thus the flexibility to adjust their decision rules and strategies. Most critical of all, civil society networks build enduring relationships that make trust possible, especially in conflict zones. Each of these engagements will change attitudes, build relationships, and make it possible to conceive of a world in which communication leads to cooperation and, in turn, to collaboration between warring parties. As Raul Lejano put it (in relation to establishing peace parks in conflict zones such as the Korean Demilitarized Zone), the process of creating such networks may lead to relationships "between actors, between groups of actors, between subsets of each group, etc. That is, we do not simply model cooperation as occurring between states, but between individuals, organizations, epistemic communities, and others. This follows from the fact that relationships are multiplex, unbounded, and dynamic."182

By *multiplexity*, Lejano means the "multiple contexts of a relationship whereby roles, exchanges, or affiliations overlap in a social relationship." In addition to their structural attributes, networks are powerful because their social agents, especially individuals, live many lives at once, and each of these public and private lives intersects with other social networks, often not related directly to the primary concern of the issue-based network. Yet information will travel over any connected network, not just one that is designed around an issue. This is why taxi drivers, hairdressers, and other agents whose location leads them to connect with many people at the boundaries of their multiple identities are such good sources of rumor or hard information.

A good example of a regional multi-sectoral network is the Northeast Asian Forest Forum (NEAFF). Launched by South Korean foresters in 1998 and initiated by businessperson Moon Kook-Hyun, participants include forestry and paper companies, environmental organizations, forester associations, scholars, and individuals in China, Mongolia, and South Korea. It aims to "restore degraded forest lands, to combat desertification and deforestation, and to promote environmentally sound and sustainable management of forest ecosystems in the region."183 NEAFF worked in the DPRK to reforest 1.6 million hectares of land deforested for fuel wood and

182 Lejano, R.P., "Theorizing Peace Parks: Two Models of Collective Action," *Journal of Peace Research*, 43(5) (2006), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022343306066565

183 *Keep Northeast Asia Green* (Seoul: Northeast Asia Forest Forum), http://www.neaff.org/

timber by establishing and upgrading forest nurseries. It also planted trees and fixed sand dunes in China's Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.

A closely related civil society initiative was Forests for Peace (FFP), an inter-Korean reforestation project that aimed to restore degraded forestland and food production in North Korea. Begun in April 1999, FFP worked on a bilateral basis with the DPRK Asia Pacific Peace Committee and shipped pine tree seeds, spray machines, branching shears, plastic sheeting, and fertilizer on 22 May 1999 to the DPRK via the Inchon-Nampo sea route. Following that initial shipment, five more consignments containing various supplies and forestry equipment were dispatched by the end of 2000.184

In the 1990s, a network of civil society organizations in Northeast Asia actively worked to address regional acid rain and yellow sand issues as well as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 1995, the Atmospheric Action Network in East Asia (AANEA) launched with members from South Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Russia. AANEA's funding came from Japan and the secretariat was based in Seoul.185 It aimed to reduce acid rain emissions, monitor the impact of acid rain by promoting citizen air quality measurement techniques, and address co-related greenhouse gas emissions.186 However, the group faded away after achieving few concrete reductions in emissions. It suspended operations not long after 2000.187 Another regional network, EnviroAsia, is sustained by a coalition of Japanese environmental groups. The project shares information about the environment between groups in South Korea, China, and Japan.188

Esook Yoon argues that the failure of state-based environmental dialogues and meetings to reduce trans-boundary air pollution in East Asia opens a political space that may be filled by non-state civil society

184 Moon, K.H. and Park, D.K., "The Role and Activities of NGOs in Reforestation in the Northeast Asian Region," *Forest Ecology and Management*, 201(1) (2004), doi: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2004.06.013

185 Jho, W. and Lee, H. (2009), p. 55.

186 Yoon, E., *et al.*, "The State and Nongovernmental Organizations in Northeast Asia's Environmental Security," in *The Environmental Dimension of Asian Security: Conflict and Cooperation over Energy, Resources, and Pollution*, ed. by Schreurs, M. A. and Hyon, I.-T. (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007).

187 Jho, W. and Lee, H. (2009), p. 55.

188 For background in English, see *East Asia Environmental Information Center* (Tokyo: Asia 3R Citizen's Network), http://www.asia3r.net/en/link/eden-j.html. See also the sharing platform in three languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) *Enviro Asia* (East Asia Environmental Information Centre), http://www.enviroasia.info/

networks. In spite of the severe and already-noted constraints on the ability of civil society organizations to affect state policy in East Asian countries, Yoon suggests:

Such informal social networks may facilitate official governmental level negotiation by opening dialogue on politically sensitive or ignored issues. NGOs also can play a role enhancing public awareness about the environment through information circulation, campaigns, and education programs. Grassroots actors may not be able to alter the fundamental distribution of power that explains the official and bureaucratic character of environmental politics in NEA today. Still, through the mobilization of social concern, civil society may achieve the goal of placing the environment higher on the NEA political agenda and slowly crack open a space for greater citizen participation in regional politics.189

In this state-centered political culture, civil society networks may still play a critically important ideational role by convening and supporting the emergence of epistemic communities in each culture that share an understanding of sustainability problems. As Jho and Lee argue, the yellow sand issue was first raised at an expert forum in 1988, and in 1992 an information cooperation network called the Northeast Asian Conference on Environmental Cooperation (NEAC) was formed by experts, civil society organizations, scholars, and research institutes. NEAC held fourteen regional meetings from 1992-2006.190 This group revealed facts about yellow sand and desertification that were previously unidentified and provided a rationale for a formal governmental investigation.191

Nonetheless, these early efforts by pioneering civil society environmental networks armed only with scientific information produced relatively few results. On yellow sand for example (whereby huge volumes of airborne dust laced with toxic materials are transported from inner Mongolia and the Mongolian desert across Korea and Japan, reaching all the way to North America), these networks succeeded in publicizing the issue and possible solutions. Yet they were unable to persuade governments to fund a proposed Northeast Asia Environment Cooperation Core Fund.192

192 Ibid.

189 Yoon, E., "The Growth of Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia: The Potential Roles of Civil Society," *The Good Society*, 12(1) (2003), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ gso.2003.0032

190 See *Northeast Asian Conference on Environmental Cooperation* (Tokyo: Environmental Cooperation Office, Japan Ministry of Environment, 2005), https://www.env.go.jp/ earth/coop/coop/neac\_e.html

191 Jho, W. and Lee, H. (2009), p. 59.

This shortfall suggested to Yasuo Takao that environmental and other single-issue networks needed to make common cause with cities and local governments engaged in their own transnational, networked activities as described above. Cities can provide the resources and a degree of accountability to civil society organizations that increase their autonomy for the central state. He argues that local governments are located strategically between transnationally linked local civil society organizations and central state governments.193 Exactly how this coordination would be achieved is not clear. Regional single-issue networks focused on air pollution, climate change, gender, etc., tend to emanate from the primary mega-city of each country, whereas many of the cross-border urban networks described by Takao are activated in second-tier cities, in part to compete with the primary capital city. We do not have a good picture of how these singleissue networks work between South Korea and China or how they interact with nascent Chinese non-governmental organizations. 194

In contrast, other civil society groups have managed to affect government policy. For example, at the center of the warzone — the Korean Demilitarized Zone — that forms the greatest barrier of all to the interlocking urban corridor stretching from Beijing to Tokyo, the DMZ Forum has set out to create a park. The goal of creating the park is to preserve biodiversity, restore Korean ecology and contribute to peacemaking, historical reconciliation, and cultural preservation by linking the Sorak, Keumkang, and Cheolwon regions north and south of the DMZ.195

This proposed peace park is at the center of the very same biogeographical region where the BeSeTo giga-city is emerging, along with a multi-sectoral network of geographers, botanists, and ecologists from government and private sector conservation organizations in each country of Northeast Asia. In meetings convened by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in Bangkok, a regional inter-governmental organization proposed a set of trans-border biodiversity corridors through Mongolia, China, Russia, and North Korea. They want to ensure sufficient habitat remains for keystone and "flagship" species,196 the successful conservation of which would ensure that a host

193 Takao, Y. (2003), pp. 78-79.

194 Xie, L., *China's Environmental Activism in the Age of Globalization* (London: City University London, Department of International Politics, 2009).

195 See the DMZ Forum's website for details: http://www.dmzforum.org/

196 See United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, *Saving the Flagship Species of North-East Asia : Nature Conservation Strategy of NEASPEC* (New York:

of other species survive the emergence of the giga-city and its networked infrastructure, such as pipelines, roads, railways, and power lines.

In turn, a biodiversity corridor that would link the northern habitat preservation zones with the DMZ Peace Park, and stretch southward to Jeju and on to Japan, has also been proposed by this author.197 As a result of the Forum's work, key government officials in the United States and South Korean militaries have indicated they support a DMZ Peace Park and biodiversity conservation, although they have not yet managed to elicit a response from the North Korean side.

Civil society networks have addressed other "hot" topics. These include the proposed Taiwan-North Korea nuclear waste deal198 and the marine oil pollution clean-up networks in which civil society organizations played an effective role either in stopping governments outright (as in the case of the nuclear waste deal) or in mobilizing massive, bottom-up civilian efforts to achieve what governments could not (as when confronted by the massive 1997 oil spill off the western coast of Japan).199

## Conclusion

This chapter presented an argument about the relationship between global problems, complexity, problem-solving, and East Asian civil society. In section 1, we asked what is "global" about a global problem and what makes it "problematic" in the first place. We reviewed categories of global problems — those that affect the sharing of global commons, those that affect our shared humanity, and those that rely on our shared rule book

198 See *TED Case Studies: Taiwan Nuclear Waste Exports (NKORNUKE)* (Washington, DC: American University), http://www1.american.edu/ted/nkornuke.htm

United Nations); *Meeting on Nature Conservation in Transboundary Areas in North East Asia Expert Group* (Incheon: North-East Asian Subregional Programme for Environmental Cooperation); Futrell, W.C., "Shallow Roots: Transnational Environmental Civil Society in Northeast Asia" in *American Sociological Association's 103rd Annual Convention* (Boston: American Sociological Association, 2008); Futrell, W.C., "Environmental Networks and Flows in Northeast Asia: NGOs and Institutes Working on Sandstorms and Migratory Birds" in *ISA's 49th Annual Convention, Bridging Multiple Divides* (San Francisco: International Studies Association, 2008).

197 See Hayes, P., "Sustainable Security in the Korean Peninsula: Envisioning a Northeast Asian Biodiversity Corridor," *The Korean Journal of International Studies*, 8(10) (2010).

199 For the spill, see *Tanker NAKHODKA Oil Spill in the Sea of Japan* (Fukui: Environmental Research Centre, Fukui Prefectural Institute of Public Health and Environmental Science), http://www.erc.pref.fukui.jp/news/Eoil.html. For the citizen clean-up, see *TED Case Studies: Japan Oil Spill* (Washington, DC: American University), http://www1. american.edu/ted/japanoil.htm

for regulating human activity. We described the World Economic Forum's map of high-impact, most-probable global risks. And we suggested that only by cross-border and cross-cultural dialogue and negotiation could we determine the priority and strategy for solving global problems via coordination and collaboration at a regional level in the form of jointly implemented, shared solutions.

In section 2, we confronted complexity head-on. We suggested that the world is becoming not merely more complicated, but more complex in the sense that all realms of human existence are increasingly unpredictable, opaque and uncertain. We added that the possible emergence of the world's first giga-city — a continuous city corridor stretching from Beijing to Tokyo — would make worse the already contradictory aspects of energy insecurity, urban insecurity, and nuclear insecurity, cross-cut by the challenges of climate change and the specific threat posed by an unstable, declining North Korea.

Drawing on the work of Korean political scientists, we suggested that complex issues require a complex, networked response, organized transnationally across the region by states or by civil society. We examined cooperative environmental projects undertaken by inter-city, crossborder networks linking Japan, South Korea, and China, and suggested that integrating the single-issue environmental and security civil society networks in future networks of local governments will create a new type of resilience in the region and generate new capacity for framing and solving global problems in spite of their complexity.

We concluded this chapter by arguing that it is central to the role of civil society networks that they provide a critical perspective as to what constitutes the most urgent global problems that originate in or affect the region as a whole, rather than mirroring the priority problems set by states. Otherwise, civil society networks risk being entrapped in *realpolitik* zerosum games, rather than moving towards *idealpolitik* based on cooperative strategies. To this end, we will present detailed case studies of energy, urban, and nuclear insecurity in the next three chapters of this book. In each case, the nature of the core problem, the "center of gravity" of urban insecurity, climate change, energy insecurity, or nuclear insecurity, differs. As a starting point in mapping the complexity landscape, each chapter considers the extent to which the authors can identify common causes and shared solutions in the problem area and country of primary concern, across problems, and across borders.

#### *84 Complexity, Security, And Civil Society In East Asia*

This mapping is similar to any exploration of uncharted terrain. What is important is to identify multiple pathways between problems and solutions, to identify the high ground that can serve as navigation points in the future, and to find ways around barriers without having to climb over the highest peaks. In reality, there is little terrain left on Earth that has not been lived in before. The same is true of conceptual territory and of the corpus of specialized insight into specific problems. Thus, the question is not to uncover but to identify the paths not taken, while learning from those with intimate knowledge of the local ground.

# 3. Energy Security and the Role of Green Economies in East Asia

*David von Hippel*

*Contributing authors: Yi Wang, Kae Takase, Tetsunari Iida, Myungrae Cho, and Sun-Jin Yun*

## Introduction

## Energy Security in a Post-Fukushima World

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated a substantial area of Japan on the Pacific coast of Honshu, north of Tokyo, with tragic consequences for the citizens of Japan and unfolding impacts in the country and elsewhere. Among the many facilities affected by this natural disaster was the Fukushima I nuclear power plant. Over the weeks and months following the earthquake (continuing, in fact, to the time of this writing), several reactors and spent nuclear fuel storage areas at the Fukushima I plant underwent slowmotion destruction. The result was fuel decomposition and the release of more radioactivity to air and water than in any nuclear power accident, save the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine. Damage to Fukushima I was initiated by the impacts of the earthquake and tsunami on the plant itself and on the local area — knocking out grid power to the plant, for example.1 The continued degradation of the plant, however,

1 For background on the Fukushima I disaster and its immediate aftermath, see, for example, Hayes, P., *et al.*, *After the Deluge: Short and Medium-Term Impacts of the Reactor Damage Caused by the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami* (Berkeley: Nautilus Institute, 2011).

has been sustained by a cascading series of events. Some of these events resulted from unavoidable choices made during in the frantic triage of the reactor crisis. Others were arguably set in motion by decisions made years ago by those who determined the shape of Japan's path to energy security.

The lessons of Fukushima continue to unfold, and are perhaps only just beginning to be appreciated. These lessons are having and will have significant impacts on the way that public policy is developed and carried out in Japan,2 in the Northeast Asia Region,3 and beyond.4 Among these impacts is the recognition that new paradigms are needed to deal with expanding complexity in the relationships between the issues and actors involved in energy sector-related decisions. The old paradigms of traditional supply-focused "energy security" are insufficient for the task. Trends toward regional energy-sector, economic, and in some cases social integration, the expanding role of civil society and local government in affecting key energy decisions, and the tightening connections between climate change considerations, economic development (including development of "green economies"), and addressing North Korean nuclear weapons and related issues, are only a few of the complex threads that affect, and are affected by, energy sector decisions.

Even before Fukushima, energy security issues had increased in complexity at the end of the 20th century and in the early years of the 21st century. Drivers of this increase included a greater number of energy importers and exporters, and different relationships between traditional suppliers and buyers (most notably, between Europe, Russia, and the other former Soviet Union states, but also between China and its sources of fuel). The change was also shaped by China becoming a large net oil and even coal importer and the Republic of Korea (ROK) becoming a supplier of nuclear power technology. Furthermore, a combination of price rises, wars, technological and physical bottlenecks tended to

2 See, for example, World Nuclear News, "Japan to Reconsider Energy Policy," *World Nuclear News*, 11 May 2011, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Japan\_to\_ reconsider\_energy\_policy-1105114.html von Hippel, D. and Takase, K. (2011).

3 See, for example, Hayes, P., "Fukushima's Implications for Korea's Nuclear Dilemmas," *East Asia Forum*, 14 May 2011, http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/05/14/ fukushima-s-implications-for-korea-s-nuclear-dilemmas/

4 "Germany to Reconsider Nuclear Policy: Merkel Sets Three-Month 'Moratorium' on Extension of Lifespans," *Spiegel*, 14 March 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/international/ world/germany-to-reconsider-nuclear-policy-merkel-sets-three-month-moratoriumon-extension-of-lifespans-a-750916.html

increase complexity; that is, they resulted in a marked increase in the number of connections between those nations and other organizations affected by energy issues, in the types of relationship existing between organizations, in the groups that are connected, and in the kinds of links made between energy security-related issues. New types of connection included, for example, energy security considerations related to climate change, in which countries were much more modestly engaged pre-1990.

### Standard Definition of Energy Security

Many of the existing definitions of energy security begin, and usually end, with a focus on maintaining energy supplies — particularly supplies of oil.5 Cornerstones of this supply-based focus include reducing vulnerability to foreign threats or pressure, preventing a supply crisis from occurring (which would arise either from restrictions in physical supply or an abrupt and significant increase in energy prices), and minimizing the economic and military impact of a supply crisis once it has occurred. As noted above, however, national and international energy policies are currently facing many new challenges and, as such, need to have their effectiveness judged by additional criteria.

Why has oil been the primary focus of energy security policy? First, oil is still the dominant fuel (~33 percent) in the global primary energy supply (as of 2012).6 (Primary energy use refers to inputs to energy transforming sectors such as power generation or oil refining before it becomes useful energy for society). Second, the Middle East, where the largest oil reserves exist, is still one of the most unstable areas in the world. Third, and related to this last observation, oil supply and prices are often influenced by the political decisions of oil suppliers and buyers. Fourth, world economic conditions, as the last several years have shown, are still vulnerable to oil price volatility, since there are certain key sectors that are heavily dependent on oil (such as transportation, petrochemicals, agriculture, and others) with limited short-term alternatives for substitution. Fifth, the key words here are "volatility" and "instability." Although globalization has improved the transparency of the oil market, prices remain to some extent at the mercy of speculators, fluctuations in currency values (which

5 See, for example, Clawson, P., "Energy Security in a Time of Plenty," *Strategic Forum*, 130 (1997).

6 British Petroleum, *BP Statistical Review of World Energy* (British Petroleum, 2013).

are subject to manipulation by oil suppliers), and, of course, the forces of market supply and demand.7 This instability has been dramatically demonstrated recently, with oil prices roughly doubling between mid-2007 and mid-2008, followed by a 75 percent decline in price by early 2009 and a return to early-2008 price levels (of ~\$100 per barrel) by early 2011, continuing at more or less that level through 2013.8

Few works have made a serious attempt to clarify the concept of energy security. One effort was that of the Working Group on Asian Energy and Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Center for International Studies. The MIT Working Group defined three distinct goals of energy security:

These goals implicitly assume that an "oil supply crisis" is the central focus of energy security policy. In essence, the two tenets of conventional energy security policy are (1) reducing threats to oil supply and (2) operating in a mode of crisis management. These tenets have traditionally constituted the primary shared view among key energy policy-makers in the East and West.

Though the major energy consuming/importing countries share the above characterization of conventional energy security thinking, there are critical divisions in policy. Two important factors influencing energy policy

7 Harris, J. (2008), *Written Testimony of Jeffrey Harris, Chief Economist, Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources United States Senate*, April 3, 2008, http://www.cftc.gov/ stellent/groups/public/@newsroom/documents/speechandtestimony/opaharris040308. pdf

8 For example, Chavez-Dreyfuss, G., "FOREX-Dollar Falls as Oil Prices Rise on Iran News," *Reuters*, 9 July 2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/07/09/markets-forexidUSN0943813620080709 Kebede, R., "Oil Hits Record above \$147," *Reuters*, 11 July 2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/07/11/us-markets-oil-idUST14048520080711. *Petroleum and Other Liquids: Europe Brent Spot Price Fob* (Washington, DC: Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, 2013), http://www. eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RBRTE&f=D

9 Samuels, R., "The MIT Japan Program Science, Technology and Management Report," in *Securing Asian Energy Investments: Geopolitics and Implications for Business Strategy* (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997).

differences between countries are natural and geopolitical conditions. One country might have abundant natural resources and another may not. Some consuming countries are located close to energy-producing countries; others are far away and require transportation of fuel over long distances. Those conditional differences can lead to variances in energy security perceptions.

In sum, there are three major attributes that define differences in energy security thinking between countries: (1) the degree to which a country is energy resource-rich or energy resource-poor, (2) the degree to which market forces are allowed to operate as compared to the use of government intervention to set prices, and (3) the degree to which longterm versus short-term planning is employed.10 Despite these differences, however, energy policies in both resource-poor and resource-rich countries are arguably converging. Both recognize the need to construct a new paradigm in energy policy, driven by common considerations such as climate change and informed and affected by events in the increasingly networked global community.

#### Energy Security Issues in Northeast Asia

Over the last two decades, economic growth in Northeast Asia — a region of more than 1.5 billion people comprising Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (DPRK), Mongolia, China, Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of China), and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), plus the Far Eastern Federal District (*okrug*) of the Russian Federation — has rapidly increased regional needs for energy services. In China and the Republic of Korea in particular, growth in the need for energy services, and for the fuels used to supply that need, has brought with it a raft of environmental problems, including rapidly mounting greenhouse gas emissions and increased emissions of other air pollutants, the latter significantly impacting local and regional air quality. The countries of the region already constitute the largest import market for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and are a major (and growing) oil import

10 For a more comprehensive discussion of these attributes see von Hippel, D., *et al.*, "Energy Security and Sustainability in Northeast Asia," *Energy Policy*, 39(11) (2011), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.07.001

market as well. Northeast Asia accounts for a progressively larger share of world primary energy use; even as energy use in the rest of the world has increased, Northeast Asia's share rose from 18.6 percent in 1999 to 25.2 percent in 2007.11

Though the region as a whole possesses resources that could contribute substantially toward its future energy needs, many major energy resources, including natural gas, oil, coal, hydroelectric power in the Russian Far East, and gas and hydro in Western China, are far from population centers. The spread of interest in shale gas production, including imports of US shale gas to the ROK and China, and production of gas from Chinese shales, was of keen interest in 2012-2013, but prospects for both of these potentially significant initiatives remain unclear at best. Major infrastructure investments will be required to bring these resources to market, and additional economic, political, technical, and environmental considerations also apply. This is particularly true when these resources cross one or several borders, and most particularly when one or more of the borders (as with pipelines or power lines from Russia to the Republic of Korea) are shared by the DPRK. Furthermore, the Six-Party Talks on denuclearization of the DPRK — and whatever forum for discussion succeeds the Six-Party Talks once the parties return to the table — link international assistance in rebuilding the DPRK's economy and energy sector to the nuclear weapons issue. Nuclear power is heavily used in the region, but issues related to the nuclear fuel cycle (uranium enrichment, nuclear waste/materials management, and prevention of proliferation of nuclear weapons and related technologies, for example) remained substantially unresolved before Fukushima and are even more uncertain today. Increasing infrastructural, political, economic, and civil society connections between many of the cities of the region, including those located on the geographical arc from Beijing to Tokyo via Seoul, mean that problems related to urban development and security are increasingly shared between nations. As a result, regional energy cooperation, approaches to the DPRK nuclear weapons dilemma,

11 von Hippel, D. and Hayes, P., "Future Northeast Asian Regional Energy Sector Cooperation Proposals and the DPRK Energy Sector: Opportunities and Constraints," *ERINA Report*, 82(2008). Hayes, P. and von Hippel, D., "Growth in Energy Needs in Northeast Asia: Projections, Consequences, and Opportunities," in *2008 Northeast Asia Energy Outlook Seminar, Korea Economic Institute Policy Forum* (Washington, DC: Korean Economic Institute, 2008).Korea Economic Institute Policy Forum (Washington, DC: Korean Economic Institute, 2008

nuclear fuel cycle issues, urban security, military security, and perhaps even partial solutions to global and regional environmental problems are intertwined in the region. All of these issues have significant implications for the energy security of the region and beyond.

## Addressing Energy Security in a Complex World

Given the many entwined issues affecting and affected by energy policies in Northeast Asia and beyond, a broader definition of energy security is needed to address the problems (and opportunities) facing the region both today and in the coming years, particularly as the deeply interconnected issues of urban security/insecurity, the development of green economies, climate change, and problems associated with North Korea must be considered in any policies that seek to increase energy security in the countries of the region. All of these issues strongly affect the ROK; therefore, the formulation of effective ROK energy, environmental, and economic development policies requires the application of a broader energy security definition. The development of government policies that are "robust" across multiple dimensions of these problems, including (but not limited to) the implementation of aggressive programs of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and distributed generation — taking advantage of nascent and growing civil society and commercial networks that promote such changes — will be among the key methods for improving energy security, defined in the broad sense in Northeast Asia.

## Chapter Road Map

Section 2 of this chapter begins with a discussion of the general issues associated with energy security in Northeast Asia, noting recent, current, and likely future patterns of energy use that form the background of energy security dilemmas in the region. Elements of a broader concept of energy security are presented — including traditional energy security elements such as supply and price security, but also extending to intimately-related energy security challenges in multiple dimensions — along with suggested methods to evaluate the energy security implications of different future "paths" for providing energy services. Section 3 describes key linkages between energy security and urban security/insecurity, suggesting that the calculus of energy security may be extended to evaluate urban insecurity issues in order to identify solutions that address both types of insecurity at the same time. Section 4 discusses the linkages between the green economy — the movement toward adopting economic patterns that help to reduce human-caused pollutant emissions and environmental impacts while also addressing human development needs — globally and in the region, and examines approaches to improving the overlap between energy security and green economy considerations as they affect both climate change and DPRK issues (that is, regional and global security issues caused by the combination of the DPRK's nuclear weapons program and its humanitarian and economic problems). We review case studies of green economy policies in Japan, China, and the ROK. Section 5 details key connections between climate change (including climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, as well as the impacts of a changing climate) and energy security, and between DPRK issues and energy security. Section 6 provides an illustrative application of the energy security analysis of alternative policies, including considerations of urban insecurity and the green economy. We emphasize impacts related to climate change and the DPRK. We conclude with a summary of lessons learned regarding policies that appear to provide important benefits in improving energy security in the region while simultaneously addressing other goals. We also offer insights on key "pressure points" for civil society to move such policies along. Section 7 emphasizes the potential role of ROK foreign policy, if influenced by the voices of civil society, in improving the energy security of the region while simultaneously ameliorating urban insecurity, securing the benefits of the green economy, and making progress on climate change and DPRK issues.

## Energy Security in Northeast Asia

## Northeast Asia's Energy Sector: Recent Past, Current Status, and Future Trends

Energy supply and demand in Northeast Asia drive the large and vibrant (as well as the not-so-large and/or not-so-vibrant) economies of the region. The energy sector of Northeast Asia is a central factor in the creation and growth of environmental problems, such as local air pollution and climate change, and of local, regional, and international problems ranging from competition over energy resources to the DPRK nuclear weapons issue. How these problems are dealt with in the future will arise from how the nations of the region and beyond pursue their energy policies. An appreciation of where the Northeast Asia energy system has come from in recent decades, where it stands now, and where, based on "business as usual" projections, it may be in the future, is key to identifying those policies that the ROK and the other nations of the region (and beyond) might adopt in addressing these issues.12

#### *Energy Demand and Demand Growth in Northeast Asia*

The countries of Northeast Asia — mainly Japan, the ROK, and Taiwan, but increasingly China as well — already constitute the world's largest market (63 percent of 2012 global exports) for LNG13 and one of the largest for crude oil and petroleum products (nearly 20 percent of global demand). Table 3.1 shows the distribution of primary energy use by fuel in the countries of Northeast Asia. The region also uses more than half (57 percent, up from about 33 percent in 1999) of global coal production, with 75 percent of regional coal use occurring in China. In 2012, the countries of Northeast Asia consumed over 21 percent of the world's petroleum, 12.4 percent of its nuclear energy (a significant decline from previous years, caused by the shut-down of many Japanese reactors for post-Fukushima safety checks), 26.1 percent of hydroelectric generation, and 10 percent of natural gas, the latter up from 5.5 percent in 1999.

Table 3.2 provides 2012 (for the most part) estimates of population in each of the countries (or, in the case of the Russian Far East and Hong Kong, sub-country regions) of Northeast Asia and shows the use of primary energy per capita by country. By way of comparison, the DPRK consumed approximately 0.8 tonnes of oil equivalent (TOE) of primary commercial fuels per capita in 1996 and China about 0.6 TOE/capita in 1999, while South Korea used 3.9 TOE per capita and Japan 4.0 TOE per capita in 1999. Since that time, as shown in Table 3.2, energy use per capita has decreased slightly in Japan, increased significantly in the ROK, and more than tripled in China, while decreasing in the DPRK.

12 Some of the text and figures in this section are adapted and updated from von Hippel, D., *et al.*, "Overview of the Northeast Asia Energy Situation," *Energy Policy*, 39(11) (2011), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.07.004

13 British Petroleum (2013).

 **Table 3.1: Primary Energy Use in Northeast Asia and the World, 2012 (except as noted) Primary Energy Use in Northeast Asia and the World, 2012\* (Unit: PJ) Natural Nuclear Energy Hydro- electric Renew- ables Total Fraction of NE Asia Fraction of World Country/Area Oil Gas Coal** China 20,250 5,420 78,432 923 8,155 1,336 114,516 74.70% 21.90% Chinese Taipei 1,765 614 1,720 383 51 48 4,581 3.00% 0.90% DPRK (North Korea) 38 - 342 - 43 213 423 0.30% 0.10% Hong Kong (China SAR) 751 106 318 - - 0 1,175 0.80% 0.20% Japan 9,135 4,399 5,207 170 767 342 20,021 13.10% 3.80% Mongolia 33 - 98 - - 4 136 0.10% 0.00% ROK (South Korea) 4,554 1,885 3,427 1,424 29 33 11,352 7.40% 2.20% Russian Far East 442 120 483 2 47 - 1,131 0.70% 0.20% **Total Northeast Asia 36,969 12,544 90,027 2,902 9,093 1,976 153,334 100.00% 29.40% NE Asia Fraction of World 21.40% 10.00% 57.60% 12.40% 26.10% 19.90% 29.40% Total Rest of World** 135,968 112,518 66,144 20,561 25,705 7,964 369,038 **70.60% TOTAL WORLD 172,937 125,062 156,171 23,463 34,798 9,940 522,371 100.00%**

*Sources*: Gulidov, R., *et al.*, "Update on the RFE Energy Sector and on the RFE LEAP Modeling Effort," in *Asian Energy Security Project Meeting Energy Futures and Energy Cooperation in the Northeast Asia Region* (Beijing: Nautilus Institute, 2007); Victor Kalashnikov, Ruslan Gulidov, and Alexander Ognev, "Energy Sector of the Russian Far East: Current Status and Scenarios for the Future," *Energy Policy*, 39(11) (2011), doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2009.09.035

#### *94 Complexity, Security, And Civil Society In East Asia*

#### **Table 3.2: Population and Energy use Per Capita in Northeast Asia, 2012**

*Note*: Estimates are for 2012 except in the cases of the DPRK (2010), RFE (2005), and Mongolia (2009/2010).

*Sources*: Population figures used for these calculations are from United Nations Population Projections, Medium Variant (2012), http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel\_population. htm, except for those of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), which are from "Population Projections for R.O.C. (Taiwan): 2012-2060," and the RFE, which is based on data from P.A. Minakir, "Russia and the Russian Far East in Economies of the APR and NEA," in Minakir, P.A., *Economic Cooperation between the Russian Far East and Asia-Pacific Countries* (2007).

Despite the explosive recent growth, energy use in Northeast Asia particularly in China, DPRK, and Mongolia — would seem to have substantial room to grow more before it reaches the levels currently maintained by Japan, the ROK, and other developed nations. Transport services, which the Chinese and North Koreans currently use relatively lightly and very lightly respectively, is one of the key areas of growth (as any recent visitor to a major Chinese city will affirm), and in all probability transport energy use will increase significantly. Residential energy use can also be expected to rise in these countries. Projected continued increases in energy use (see below) underscore the need for policies that consider the multiple connections between energy supply and demand and other issues in the region.

Figure 3.1 summarizes primary energy use in the countries of Northeast Asia (plus the Far Eastern District of Russia) over the period from 1990 through 2006. During those 16 years, the total energy use by the region increased by a factor of two, led by a tripling of energy use in China and an increase of about 150 percent in the ROK and Taiwan. This happened despite primary energy use in Japan, the second largest energy user in the region, growing hardly at all from 2000 through 2007 (after having grown by about 20 percent during the previous decade). During the period from 1990 through 2007, Northeast Asia's share of global primary energy demand grew by half, from about 17 percent to over 25 percent. Note that the totals shown in Figure 3.1 do not (with the exception of the DPRK) include use of biomass fuels, which provide a significant (though decreasing) portion of residential energy use in China and in Mongolia, as well as in the DPRK.