Kyoto University · Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Professor Shinichi Kitano's research lab specializes in rural development, natural resource management, and sustainable agriculture, with a particular focus on community-based resource governance, social capital in rural communities, and the sustainability of aquaculture and fisheries. The lab investigates institutional and behavioral factors influencing the conservation of common-pool resources, including abandoned farmland, bluefin tuna farming, and community-managed fisheries, often employing empirical and econometric methods such as propensity score matching and inductive measurement of social capital. The lab emphasizes policy-relevant research that bridges data quality, institutional design, and sustainable resource use in Japan and beyond.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
In recent decades, there has been a global debate over who should manage common property resources (CPRs) related to agriculture. Because rational and efficient farmers only work farmland with good conditions or leave for other industries, in areas where production conditions are poor, local resources that were once collectively maintained are no longer managed. The Japanese government has positioned community farms (CFs) as an important player in local agriculture and has been striving to devel
Abandoned farmland is particularly problematic in developed countries where agriculture has a comparative disadvantage in terms of effective use of land resources invested over time. While many studies have estimated the causes of these problems, few have discussed in detail the impact of data characteristics and accuracy on the estimation results. In this study, issues related to the underlying data and the estimation of the determinants of farmland abandonment were examined. Most previous stud
The resource management of bluefin tuna has been strengthened worldwide; in Japan, bluefin tuna aquaculture production has increased as a result of this change. In particular, several large companies have entered the domestic bluefin tuna farming industry, and the impact of this shift on the market has been considerable. In this study, we examine the criteria by which these companies determine the locations of their respective production areas; we also analyze how they evaluate various productio
ABSTRACT In rural development research, social capital (SC) complements the causal gap between the endowment of resources and other capital in a community and the performance of collective actions, such as common‐pool resource management. However, the concept of SC is ambiguous and its measurement is controversial. This study focuses on rural SC and attempts to measure it inductively using data from 994 Japanese communities related to various collective actions (22 types), rather than deductivel
With the surge in global demand for seafood, although efforts are being made to guide fisheries and farmed aquaculture, which still rely on natural resources, toward sustainability, it is pertinent to guide people toward sustainable consumption patterns. We consider bluefin tuna, whose largest consumer is Japan and whose stock levels were at risk in the early 2010s, and examine whether consumers can be impelled to consume fish produced in a resource-conserving manner if they have adequate inform
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