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Paper short abstract

The presentation shows how Japanese flood-control documents frame nature —especially rivers—as manageable hazards. This technocratic environmental discourse legitimises expert control and restricts citizens’ meaningful participation in river governance.

Paper long abstract

How environmental and climate-related issues appear in public discourse—through media coverage, administrative communication, or formal government agendas—shapes public understanding and legitimizes particular policy responses (Leipold et al., 2019). In the Japanese context, research has examined the evolution of climate-security discourse (Kameyama and Ono, 2021), the relationship between disasters and neoliberal governance (Okada, 2013), and the moral and behavioural expectations embedded in state disaster-preparedness policies (Kitagawa, 2016). However, little attention has been paid to how natural environments, especially rivers, are discursively constructed in government documents and how these constructions guide disaster-risk governance.

Drawing on the concept of cognitive frames (Lakoff, 2010) and scholarship on environmental discourse (Sina et al., 2019), this presentation investigates how rivers are represented in state documents dealing with disaster risk reduction. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of publicly available meeting minutes and reference materials for citizens, produced by the government-led Heavy Rain Inspection Committee, Flood Control Council, and the Flood Control Scientific Committee, following the devastating floods that struck southern Kumamoto Prefecture in July 2020. These meetings were convened to assess damage and to plan future flood-control measures for the Kawabegawa and Kumagawa. Our analysis reveals that “the river” is overwhelmingly framed as a source of danger requiring technical oversight and infrastructural intervention. Through this framing, the river becomes an object to be controlled, and authority is vested primarily in state institutions and engineering experts who are positioned as the legitimate actors capable of designing effective risk-reduction measures.

We conclude by discussing the broader implications of these technocratic constructions of rivers for collaboration between local government and citizens. Framing the river as a governable hazard aligns with long-standing state priorities for land and river development, yet it narrows the space for participatory policymaking. In the documents, citizens are cast as non-experts, expected to receive and accept official explanations rather than contribute to shaping river governance strategies, despite their legally prescribed engagement in the political process. This approach limits opportunities for inclusive dialogue and constrains the development of more community-centred approaches to disaster risk reduction.