In Japan, the Policy Evaluation System was introduced to the administration in 2001. This system was launched to improve the administration that traditionally focused on establishing laws or getting resources, when a standard guideline on policy evaluation was formulated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

  When the system was finally legislated, it became firmly established in the policy management cycle (the PDCA cycle) of each ministry. In 2005, three years after the enforcement of the Government Policy Evaluation Act, the system was totally reviewed. It was later on decided that the functions of the Policy Evaluation System should be drastically enhanced as a result of the budget screening process in 2009.

  However, there are several arguments concerning the Policy Evaluation System.

  In my paper, I would like to find the cause of these arguments by looking back on the progress that the system has made and unveil its visions of the future.

  Performance measurement has been widely used in the “Policy Evaluation System” of Japanese government. Since 2011, this system has been linked to “Administrative Operations Review”, another system of performance measurement newly implemented. Although Japanese Government intends to use its performance measurement systems just as Western countries do, there are some difficulties. This article classifies the problems of performance measurement practices in Japanese government and explores the way of acquiring the quality of measurement. This article also discusses the forms of complementarity between performance measurement and program evaluation, that is a weak point in the evaluation systems of Japan.

  More than eleven years have passed since the central government organs in Japan started to implement policy evaluation. In recent years, many commentators claim that the evaluation conducted under the policy evaluation system has been under-utilized. Because the definition and the concept of “evaluation use” have remained unresolved, the present state of the “actual” evaluation use has not been well understood. Based on such recognition, this article tries to build a framework for empirically analyzing evaluation use of the central government organs through clearly conceptualizing the idea of “evaluation use.” The Kirkhart’s theoretical framework, which this article consulted for theoretical reference, is a model based on a societal viewpoint to understand the serial process in which the effect of program evaluation is diffused. In this article, by modifying the Kirkhart's model, a new theoretical framework with an organizational focus is proposed of which purpose is to analyse the evaluation use under the policy evaluation system in Japan. A tentative analysis of the current state of evaluation use by the central government organs revealed that the users of evaluation are mainly the public servants in charge of individual programs and their superiors, and that the purpose of use is predominantly for understanding their own programs in charge. The theoretical framework proposed in this article is an effective tool for empirically analyzing evaluation use in public organizations. Further analyses using the framework are anticipated.

  Ten years have passed since the Government Policy Evaluation Act of Japan was passed. With accountability as one of the purposes of the policy evaluation act, I ask “did the law improve the accountability of Japanese government agencies?”

  Results show that while the transparency of government agencies improve through the introduction of the policy evaluation system; the accountability of government agencies did not develop as much. However, the more important issue is why and how the accountability of government agencies did not improve.

  The aim of this paper is to clarify, from the standpoint of political science, the relationship between policy evaluation and accountability in government agencies of Japan.

  From April 1st, 2001, Japanese government started the Administrative Incorporated Agency system (AIA) in the part of the reformation of the central governmental organization. This system has a notion that government must make its service in the view of the social and economic sustainability but not directly. And AIA must make its service with high-quality and -efficiency, institute autonomy and transparency. Government keeps AIA high performance with dual evaluation system; Committee on AIA Evaluation in each ministry and Committee on Policy Evaluation and AIA Evaluation in MIC (CPEA).

  This paper studies the way CPEA evaluates AIA performance chronologically, especially CPEA tries to shrink the load-feeling for AIA evaluation work by the evaluatees and so on.