Uneven Processes of Institutional Change: Path Dependence, Scale and the Contested Regulation of Urban Development in Japan ANDRÉ SORENSEN Abstract This article contributes to the understanding of institutional change in urban governance through an analysis of ongoing conflicts over the regulation of development in Japanese cities. A typology of institutional change processes helps to show that while change at central and local government scales have been transformative of the institutional frameworks of land planning and land development, they are deeply contradictory in their trajectories of change. The main findings are first that urban environmental governance is subject to uneven playing fields that privilege deregulation and the neoliberalization of urban governance. It appears significantly harder to achieve stronger environmental governance capacity that requires large-scale political mobilization, available policy frameworks and political opportunity, whereas deregulation appears to need little more than political will at the centre and an opportunistic approach to the rewriting or reinterpretation of regulations. Second, at the local scale the environmental and political incentives to create stronger planning regulations appear strong enough to support continued incremental strengthening of the planning system. In the Japanese case, at least, these two conflicting policy trajectories create a degree of contingency and open-endedness that suggests that it is too soon to predict that the possibility of democratic and effective environmental governance is necessarily lost in the tides of neoliberalization. Introduction There is no doubt that during the last three decades the dominant trend in the developed countries and virtually everywhere else, is neoliberalization: the shift towards increased reliance on market relations and mechanisms in areas of life and governance that for the first three decades following the second world war had been the terrain of collective political processes of decision-making. To distinguish the current period from the earlier period of liberal market capitalism of the late nineteenth century, the process of liberalization since the 1970s is often referred to as neoliberalization. An important literature on the impacts of neoliberalization on cities has developed over the last decade, that has examined and theorized the impacts of these shifts on processes of urban restructuring (Jessop, 2002; Keil, 2002; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Brenner, 2004a; Wilson, 2004; Hackworth, 2007; Purcell, 2007). One contribution of this work is the recognition that — contrary to work on globalization that detected evidence of convergence both in economic processes (Ohmae, 1990; Fukuyama, 1992) and in urban governance and urban form (Cohen, 1996; The author gratefully acknowledges the perceptive advice and criticism of three IJURR referees, whose suggestions have contributed to a much stronger article. Volume 35.4 July 2011 712–34 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00975.x © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA