Abstract
The social economy (cooperative/not-for-profit organizations) of Italy shows expansion of employment as well as business activities, and it is considered an important "collaborative" partner by local governments when they evaluate innovative social policies of recent years. Although these "collaborative" relations have an affinitive relationship to neo-liberalism on the one hand, their relevance, on the other hand, to the theory of commons or endogenous development theory of the community is also strong. I will discuss these two aspects of collaborative relations through the "subsidiarity principle". In this report, after surveying how the subsidiarity principle has been received in Japan, firstly I will try to show how in Italy the subsidiarity principle is accepted and reconstructed, referring to "horizontal subsidiarity", which carries out the strategic positioning in the relation with the local government. Secondly I will refer to "collaboration" and "strain" between cooperative/not-for-profit and local governments, taking the example of a local city in Italy. Thirdly, in the summary, I will discuss how the Italian case study contributes to on-going debates in Japanese society.
