抄録
With the increase of decentralization, local governments are left to solve their own policy problems more than ever. Existing research focused on the decision making process of local government are scarce and fails to consider both organizational hierarchy and many participants. Based on these point, the purpose of this article is to investigate the decision making process of local government by expanding upon the Garbage Can Model of Cohen et al. (1972). I did both interviews and questionnaires targeted at staff in the Affairs Department of local government X. I found postponement of problems that the Section did not tackle problems and interruption that the decision making process went back former stage. This postponement had an effect to tackle important problems to be solved in the short term inside of the Section. In addition, in the situations where decision making process was in progress, postponement was to develop decision making process related to other important problems, and to solve these problems. Interruption had an effect to tackle important problems that the Section overlooked. The result shows that postponement of problems and interruption played an important role in the decision making process of local government X.
