変革期地方行政に関する研究動向と地理学的視点

イギリスの事例を中心として

抄録

There is no doubt that local governments in Japan will face significant changes in the coming era of decentralization. Japanese geographers, however, have paid little attention to these phenomena. To understand the changes and their potential consequences, we must identify some geographical perspectives to be employed. This paper reviews geographical studies on local administrative reforms in Europe. After an outline of trends in local administration reforms, we examine employment restructuring in the public sector. We then focus on the new role of local governments as entrepreneurs. Following these reviews, we suggest three essential geographical perspectives and discuss the extent to which they can be applied to further study within the Japanese context.
In the U.K., after the introduction of local administrative reform in the 1980s, new forms of public sector organizations emphasizing cost-reduction and flexibility have been adopted. Geographical studies have attempted to understand this trend from two main perspectives. The first perspective emphasizes the polarization of employees in the local public sector, in which the regional labor market is divided into a core of employees and a range of more peripheral workers. The second perspective examines geographical variations in the form of restructuring and their implications for local societies.
Today, there are an increasing number of regional economic development projects undertaken by local governments in Europe. Some geographers, by focusing on different administrative processes in the course of project implementation, have examined the relationship between each process and spatial scale. In particular, the planning function in peripheral regions is often contracted out to authorities with a larger jurisdictional territory where they can more readily recruit highly specialized planners.
In short, previous literature on public sector reform has been mainly concerned with: (1) public sector employment in the regional labor market; (2) geographical manifestations of restructuring and its impact; and (3) spatial scales of administrative functions. We consider the first and third perspectives to be particularly useful for further geographical research, both theoretical and empirical, in Japan.