官房-原局関係からみた文部省の政策立案過程の分析(III 研究報告)

抄録

Although several attempts were made to change educational policy in the 1970s and 1980s in Japan, substantial changes were not realized until the second half of the 1990s. Why did the change occur only in the late 1990s? One explanation has been that the Ministry of Education was forced to change its former policy because of external pressures brought by ad hoc committees and councils set up in the cabinet during the 1990s. This argument appears to exaggerate the strong tendency of the Ministry as a whole to preserve the status quo and often ignores internal processes that enable changes in attitudes within the Ministry. This paper attempts to explore such internal factors in terms of the power relationship between various bureaus in the Ministry. The paper focuses on the relation between the Minister's Secretariat ('kanbou') and other bureaus ('genkyoku') such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Bureau. These two types of bureaus entail a difference in responding to the demands for change. In contrast to the other bureaus that are responsible for the implementation of specific policy, the main role of the Minister's Secretariat (MS) is to exercise a comprehensive coordinating function over all bureaus ('kanboukinou') ; and thus, the MS is more flexible when it comes to policy change than are other bureaus. We hypothesized that the MS's coordinating function was strengthened during the 1990s and that this allowed the Ministry to change its overall behavior. To examine this hypothesis, we analyzed the status of the MS within the Ministry concerning three points: (1) changes in the organizational structure of the MS; (2) the career pattern of the Director-General, or the chief, of the MS; and (3) the frequency of contacts between the Director-General of the MS and the Prime Minister. Results of our research found that, first, the sections responsible for investigation, statistics, and policy planning within the Ministry were integrated into the MS by the 1970s; in the 1980s, a Senior Deputy Director-General was newly established in the MS; and the Deputy Director-Generals of the other bureaus were transferred to the MS. These reorganizations reinforced the structure of the MS. Second, through analyzing the career pattern of the people who were appointed as Director-Generals of the MS, the paper demonstrates that, though being equal in rank to other bureau chiefs, the position grew important during the late 1990s in terms of the status which it has related to its influence on the ministry's behavior. Third, whereas there was hardly any contact between the Director-General of the MS and the Prime Minister in the 1980s, such contact sharply increased in the late 1990s. These analyses revealed that whereas the structure of the MS was empowered during the 1980s, the position of the MS's Director-General remained unimportant within the Ministry. It was in the late 1990s that the MS properly performed its coordinating function attaining its high status among the bureaus as well as relying on its reinforced structure. This empowerment of the MS's function then enabled the Ministry to change its policy during the same period.