Japanese types of inner-municipal decentralization and the new problems of community politics

Abstract

Since 1990s, the period of economic depression and fiscal crisis in public sectors, many new policies and programmes, which are characterized by the words like “collaboration”, “the new public” and so on, have been planned and executed by the national as well as local governments. They try to reduce the scale of finance but want to keep the total amount and quality of public services in order to ensure the so-called “safety net” and social integration. Various experimental programmes are now proposed and practiced in order to activate and mobilize different activists in the “civil society”, who are expected to supply various public services in place of governments. In the last decade the system of “inner-municipal decentralization” has much interested not only academic but also practical, administrative and political circles. The interest is decisively influenced by the concept of “collaboration” in that the system should contribute to mobilizing different powers of “civil society” to supply public services whereas the system in European countries should primarily contribute to make public decision making more democratic.