Governance and Information in the Local Government Plan: A Comparative Case Study of the Community Welfare Plan

Abstract

This paper analyses the Community Welfare Plan which is a comprehensiveplan by the welfare sector, and focuses on what kinds of plans and its planning processes exist and what is the primary factor of the variation by applying the combination of the planning theory, the governance theory and the coordination theory in the New Institutional Economics to the four cases in Kanagawa Prefecture. The Community Welfare Plan, which is prescribed by the Social Welfare Act enacted in 2000 and enforced in 2003, has three distinguishing traits which requires synthesizing the policy field plan, involving the citizen in the formulation stage and leaving to a high degree of discretion of local governments. As a result, this paper reveals following two points about the plans of policy field in the governance condition of the plural actors and the horizontal relations of actors.

First of all, as a comprehensive plan itself has the internal inconsistency, the Community Welfare Plan specializes some function required which has four types. These patterns of the plan are caused by three conditions. In their planning, these patterns depend on the information sufficiency which is exchanged among actors at field level, the information efficiency, and a fragility of the system which is caused by whether the municipal office makes it possible to reach the agreement on the contents of the plan or not.

Secondly, the planning process has something to do with the function which the community welfare plan itself fulfills in the actual enforcement of a policy. This paper proves these points by comparing the four cities in Yamato, Yokosuka, Fujisawa, Ebina.