Centralization or decentralization: Divergent paths of governing offshore wind between China and Japan

China and Japan have started to develop commercial offshore wind farms since the late 2000s and early 2010s. During the past decades, the gap in offshore wind capacity between the two countries widened. While China is poised to dominate the Asian offshore wind market, Japan remains at the initial stage of development. Combining the data from both semi-structured interviews and desk research, this paper conducts a comparative study of offshore wind policy mixes and analyzes underlying factors that affect the selection of national strategies and policy packages. It is argued that the selection of policy mixes for offshore wind energy reflects a careful balancing of facilitating and constraining factors including resource availability, technology maturity, and preexisting institutional structure and practices. These push and pull forces shape the policy landscape for offshore wind, which covers (1) resource surveys and national targets, (2) inter-ministerial coordination, (3) central-local relationship, and (4) feed-in-tariffs (FITs). It is found that the two countries had chosen different approaches for regulatory reform. China adopted a decentralized path, solving the problems of institutional inertia by turning local bureaucrats into entrepreneurial reformers, whereas Japan took a centralized approach, attempting to remove regulatory complexities by establishing an integrated administrative regime at the central level. A better understanding of the two approaches and their underlying factors might not only help policymakers capitalize on existing governing regimes but also devise new mechanisms to create a better policy environment for offshore wind energy.