Environmental impact assessments are designed to make industries provide information to the government and the public about the impact projects might have on the environment and to provide local citizens an opportunity to voice their concerns regarding a project before it begins. An environment impact assessment law is something the Environment Agency has been seeking since 1975, the first year the Agency introduced an environment impact assessment bill to the Diet. Every year for the next eight, the Agency continued to negotiate and revise versions of the same bill, but faced with strong opposition from MITI and the Ministry of Construction failed in its efforts to introduce environmental impact assessment into the legislative program. Finally, in 1984, the Agency gave in to a compromise solution, a Cabinet decision stating that before projects requiring government licensing or approval be carried out, industries must first conduct an assessment of the impact projects will have on the environment. A Cabinet decision does not impose penalties for noncompliance and is essentially a form of administrative guidance.
Japan remains the only industrialized country without an environment impact assessment law.
When LDP interest in the international environment made a new environment basic bill a possibility, the Environment Agency was quick to see this as an opportunity to push through something that had long been a high priority on its domestic policy wish list. First, in October 1992 the Central Council for Pollution Control and the Nature Conservation Council, advisory bodies to the agency, submitted a report on what the contents of a new basic law should be. Then, two months later a group of experts and local government representatives was convened to study the problems with the existing Cabinet decision on environmental impacts. The group found that because assessments were made just before projects entered the construction phase, changes in plans were difficult. Furthermore, the director-general of the Environment Agency was found to have no voice in these assessments unless his opinion was directly requested.