Although the community currency movement flourished until the 1980s, it has been faced with stagnation in recent years. In this paper, we hypothesize that the performance of community currency organizations is affected by each member’s quality of participation in the organizations as a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991). We conduct a case study (including a field survey, questionnaire survey, and social network analysis for transaction records) of the local exchange trading system (LETS) organization in Sweden in order to examine this hypothesis; the results support the hypothesis. In addition, we also outline some practical implications.

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Despite the considerable research on the relations between individual attributes and participations in community-based activities and on social networks, relations between face-to-face interaction and participations in community-based activities have not been identified enough. In this paper, we analyze the influence that face-to-face interaction exerted on participations by employing logit models and using the survey data from a national representative sample. The two following suggestions are obtained from the estimation results. Firstly, the activeness of associations with the relatives or through the sports and hobby affects participation in community-based activities as well as associations with the neighbors. Secondly, the similar variables may affect participations in the NPO activities and volunteering. These results suggest that it is meaningful that policymakers design measures for promoting community-based groups, NPO activities and volunteering in an integrated manner.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of community in reducing the sense of inequality and anxiety for the risks in life empirically by using the survey data. We hypothesized that the decline in the functioning of community in mutual support reduces the risk insurance role of community and affects the sense of equality and fairness negatively. In testing this hypothesis, we focus on the mobility of the respondents, because it is possible to consider the possibility that fundamental sense of equality is generated through the experiences of mobility among income classes. The results of the analysis show that the sense of inequality is largely affected by the sense of fairness of the relative position in the society, and the improving the role of community enhances the degree of happiness through the improvement of life security, but has little effect on the sense of fairness. The results suggest the possibility of Esterlin Paradox in case where the economic growth decreases the community functioning.

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This paper conducted case analysis of NPO’s advocacy function in psychiatric field. Analysis was conducted in order to consider local institutionalization and its challenge of the advocacy function of NPO. The psychiatric Ombudsman system is a local system of an advocacy function institutionalized in Osaka based on the activity of one NPO. Although this had a fixed result, it was abolished for reasons of financial reduction. The following three points became clear through this case analysis: (1) The “collaborative project” of local government and the NPO is institutionalized based on the plan proposal of the NPO and its process itself was the accountability of this NPO; (2) Institutionalization of the local advocacy function brought a certain amount of improvement to the policy and practice of that field in prefecture level; (3) It is necessary for advocacy NPO to achieve the accountability for the significance of an institutional result and the complementarity with the local government not only to the local government which commission that project but also to politicians and citizens in general.

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