The level of influence of innovative local governments

Abstract

This article examines how innovative local governments influence other local governments that do not tackle innovative policies. If decentralization efforts make substantial progress, local governments will be able to make public policy freely without the guidance of the central government. Nevertheless, many local governments do not have the ability to initiate innovative public policy, and rather tend to imitate innovative public policies implemented by a few local governments.

This article conducts a case study of information policy implemented by the Okayama prefectural government. This policy area was selected because the central government has recently emphasized more flexibility in local government policies, and local government has responded by imitating information policies implemented by a handful of innovative local governments. Okayama is studied because it was the first local government involved in promoting the Japanese “ginformation superhighway.”

To substantiate this characterization of local government policy diffusion, this article first compares the plans to promote an “information society” at the regional level of forty-seven prefectures, and analyzes both common and different features of “information superhighway” policies in each prefecture. Second, this thesis analyzes whether other prefectural governments imitated the Okayama “information superhighway” policy in its entirety, by comparing them to the specific characteristics of the Okayama policy. These characteristics include: a high-speed, fiber-optic network, a communications network owned by the prefectural government rather than leased from private companies, a local IP exchange point in the prefecture, and information not only prefectural government, but also about hospitals, schools, and other institutions, including internet service providers or cable television.

The article concludes that the influence of innovative local governments on other local governments is not especially strong, but that other local governments try to learn from the main characteristics of innovative local governments and use them to their own advantage.