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Paper short abstract

Japan frames climate change as an element of its diplomacy. Building on interviews with policymakers and primary sources, a process tracing analysis Japan’s climate security strategy reveals that narrative framing enables Tokyo to shape regional order and legitimize engagement beyond military means.

Paper long abstract

Recently, Japan has increasingly framed climate change as a central element of its Indo-Pacific diplomacy, positioning climate action not only as an environmental concern but as a key dimension of non-traditional security. While extant scholarship extensively analyzes Japan’s FOIP vision little attention has been paid to how Japan strategically narrates climate security as a means of shaping shared understandings of order beyond military instruments.

This paper addresses this gap by examining Japan’s strategic narratives on climate security and situating them in a comparative perspective with Germany as another norm-oriented middle power. It advances two core arguments. First, Japan employs climate security narratives to reconcile an increasingly proactive regional posture with domestic constraints on the use of military force, framing climate cooperation, decarbonization support, and capacity-building as legitimate and necessary components of regional security. Second, compared to Germany, Japan’s climate-related narratives exhibit stronger regional embeddedness and greater linkage to concrete policy practices in the Indo-Pacific, reflecting Japan’s exposure to geopolitical competition.

The analysis is grounded in the theoretical framework of strategic narratives, which conceptualizes foreign policy discourse as a tool through which states construct shared interpretations of international order and define their own roles within it. The paper combines qualitative analysis of policy documents, strategy papers, and speeches by Japanese and German climate policy actors since the mid-2010s with insights from semi-structured interviews with practitioners and experts. This mixed qualitative approach allows to capture not only formal policy positions but also underlying perceptions, role conceptions, and narrative structures that shape climate diplomacy.

Empirically, the paper investigates discourses on as climate-resilient infrastructure, maritime environmental governance, and energy transition support. These cases illustrate how Japan positions itself as a normative partner in regional climate governance while avoiding overt securitization. By contrast, Germany’s Indo-Pacific climate narratives remain more globally framed and less tightly connected to region-specific policy implementation. By foregrounding climate security narratives, the paper contributes to Japan Studies and lR scholarship by demonstrating how climate diplomacy functions as a key instrument of Japan’s contemporary Indo-Pacific strategy and as a source of diplomatic agency for middle powers under conditions of intensifying great-power competition.