Local autonomy is generally the principle that constitutes the governance mechanism and is a way of thinking to establish a local government based on the democratic principle apart from the central government. Concerning to the public policy on local autonomy, firstly, there is a policy to locate local autonomy in the national governance system. Secondly, the positioning of local autonomy in the governance structure necessarily requires policies that prescribe the relationship between the central government and the local government, that is, the intergovernmental relationship. Thirdly, policies governing the local government system responsible for local autonomy are required. Generally, it is necessary to define the type and hierarchy of local governments, and to institutionalize their authority and organization. Fourth, apart from the basic framework of local autonomy, there are regional policies that the central government directly or indirectly works with local governments and policy intervention in individual areas of governmental action. Fifth, local governments as democratic governments basically decide and implement policies to achieve their objectives. Activities of such will have the meaning of public policy. In order for activities related to public policy to be implemented, it is needed whether they are mounting ideas and awareness, knowledge and technology, and their operational capabilities about public policy. In this paper, from the five viewpoints, we consider the public policy of local governments in Japan. For that purpose, we will inquire a theoretical study and outline the history of public policy on local autonomy up to today. And I would like to clarify issues on public policy in local autonomy.

This paper describes the formation and challenges of civil society in Japan, from the origins of citizen autonomy and citizen participation and its theoretical discourse to the situation since the 1990s, when citizen participation became more and more interwoven with the restructuring of local government. The first part provides an overview of the development of citizen autonomy and the emergence of civil society in Japan from the 1970s to the 2010s and details representational examples of citizen activities. By categorizing citizen activities into six different types it becomes possible to identify the major challenges of civil society. For the improvement of the infrastructure of civil society it is important that advocacy groups engage actively, and generate a framework that allows to secure funds for these citizen activities. The second part centers on the origins of citizen autonomy and citizen participation and its theoretical discourse in the 1970s. During this era the discourse centered on the necessity of citizen participation for the reform of local government and the development of new policies. Citizen participation would be considered as of a dynamism that included the institutionalization of the civic movements but also the new civic movements. The third part analyzes how in comparison to the 1970s the environment of civil participation in the 1990s changed and its methods diversified. Since the decentralization reform of 2000, a restructuring of local self-governing bodies into citizen local governments has been attempted. The reform of municipal assemblies is still only beginning to take shape, and various forms of citizen participation are now in the process of implementation in regards to the connected tasks of overseeing and allocating municipal budgets and policy evaluation.

The abolition of agency-delegated functions in the first decentralization reform extended local governments’ authority to establish ordinances over any functions carried out by their administrative bodies. The authority of local councils, which have voting rights of ordinances, was institutionally expanded drastically. Thereafter, local council reforms, typified by the establishment of the basic ordinance of the local council, prevailed in local governments throughout the country. The first basic ordinance of a local council was established in 2006 in Kuriyama Town in Hokkaido Prefecture. over the next twelve years, it has spread to more than 800 local governments across the country. This spread was made despite the basic ordinance of the local council being not legally bound to be established. This suggests that there existed widespread recognition of the necessity and inevitability of reforms among local councils. A basic ordinance of a local council usually prescribes the activation of deliberations and the reinforcement of policy making by the local council and the local councilors. The Local Autonomy Act has also been repeatedly amended, in order to institutionally enhance the freedom of the organization and operation of local councils. In this way, endogenous reforms have proceeded in parallel with institutional reforms based on national law, which has dramatically changed the conditions of public policy activities undertaken by local councils nowadays. Nevertheless, most of policy proposals submitted by the executive are still approved without an amendment, whereas the number of established policy ordinances submitted by local councilors and local councils’ committees has been limited to the exceptional amount in a small part of local councils. Would it be better to acknowledge that local councils’ roles and influence on public policy has been unchanged despite a series of local council reforms? Or, would it be better to consider that some results have been achieved, although they are not evident in indicators which are easy to be confirmed outward. This article identifies the issues to be examined in the future, based on the limited facts observed.

Japanese local governments have been and will have been faced the fiscal pressure to the rising expenditure and decrease of tax revenue due to the deterioration of facilities and infrastructures, and the decrease, aging of the population. Though the general revenue for local governments in macro-base will have been financed as the same level of FY2018 between 2019 and 2022 under the Basic Policies for Economic Management 2018, the fact that the general revenue has been financed by the deficit-covering national and local bonds should indicate the constant lack in source of revenue in the long-term perspective. In order to bring down this fiscal deficit, it is needed to practice the following 6 fiscal policies on the platform of the Local Public Finance Program (LPFP). 1. to raise the Standard Local Tax Rates. 2. to raise the national tax rates which are transferred to the Local Allocation Tax, 3. to raise the Local Allocation Tax Rates, 4. to transfer the tax revenue resource from the national to the local, 5. to exchange the tax revenue resources between the national and local. 6. to increase the 6. to increase the LPFP expenditure. In the sixth measure, it is needed to have a consensus on the meaning of the standard of local public services in the stakeholders. The consensus should be based on the understanding of the National Standard not the National Minimum. In the practice of 6 measures, the platform for coordinate and decide the intergovernmental fiscal relation should be established and the representatives from the local governments participate and decide the agenda.

As decentralization progresses, local rules will definitely increase. However, local rules may increase the administrative procedure costs for businesses and hinder the growth of non-local business.

The Subcommittee for Administrative Burden Reduction (within the Council for Promotion of Regulatory Reform) estimated that businesses spend about 350 million hours per year for administrative procedures in seven prioritized areas. By 2020, the Subcommittee aims to reduce the burden by approximately 77 million hours (22.2%) per year. This would be eguivalent to an annual savings of approximately 200 billion Yen. Moreover, a taskforce established by the Council tackled the problem of documentary forms in local govermrnts; the taskforce aims to standardize documentary forms for 23 applications.

Standardizing local rules about documentary forms does not necessarily contradict decentralization. If documentary forms are specifted by national law, these local rules are legally administrative guidance seeking prior procedure for applications. Thus, local governments shall not obstruct the applicant’s ability to use a documentary form according to national law. If local governments strictly adhere to this legal requirement, the administrative costs borne by businesses will be reduced. In addition, if a documentary form is not specified by national law, local governments should voluntarily standardize one.

Today, welfare services account for a large proportion of the administrative services of local governments, and a significant portion of the discretionary authority for these services is delegated to local governments. However, part of this authority is still bound by the central government’s rules. A likely reason for this lies in the way sources of revenue are structured. Since not all welfare funds are provided from local governments’ own-source revenue, central government involvement is inevitable to some extent.

Given the arguments for decentralization of authority in recent years, we suggest, in this paper, that such decentralization should be promoted to some extent, but that the central government should also be involved in welfare policy areas such as health care and elderly care, because the important principle of universality and equality dictates that the same level of services should be provided everywhere. Thus, we here consider appropriate means of decentralizing authority in the welfare policy of local governments.

This paper focuses on the cultural fit between global public sector reform ideas and their application within the Japanese context. In recent decades, many politico-administrative reform ideas have been transferred from one country to another, backed by similar political ideologies, e.g. neo-liberalism and managerialism, and similar practical reasons, e.g. fiscal deficit in the government sector, especially in developed countries. Among such initiatives is agency reform, the so-called ‘agencification’ phenomenon, in which semi-autonomous, arm’s length agencies are created with a focus on policy implementation. These organisations are structurally disaggregated from central departments and act with some degree of independence. The design of this type of agency is different from conventional bureaucratic organisations in that they have more autonomy and discretion, are more performance-focused than process-oriented, and thus should improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public service delivery. The Japanese central government adopted this type of administrative agency in 2001, known as the Independent (Incorporated) Administrative Agency (IAA; dokuritsugyosei-hojin) scheme, under a strong politico-administrative reform initiative. The design and creation of the IAA was modelled after the experience of the UK’s reform agenda. This research focuses on the compatibility between this exogenously transferred idea of the organisational institution and the Japanese politico-administrative and cultural contexts. This paper specifically explores the fit between such an exogenous public management idea and an embedded national cultural dimension. Based on the implications of the well-known Hofstede’s National Culture Dimensions, this work will reveal that the Japanese national context is originally not entirely compatible with the types of agencies represented by its global counterparts.

In 2008, the Basic Act on Biodiversity was enacted. It stipulates that local governments shall endeavor to set their Local Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (LBSAPs), As a result, 87% of. prefectures set LBSAps by fiscal 2016. However, only 4% of municipalities have set LBSAps. The model of the previous research had predicted that if the national government adopted a new policy, local governments would compete with one another aiming to adopt the same policy. Whv do not municipalities set LBSAPs even after the national govemment adopts the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action plan (NBSAP)?

In this paper, we analyze the factors that encourage the set of LBSAps using the data of the questionnaire survey. we examined whether the model of policy diffusion in previous research can be applied to municipalities.

In conclusion, unlike the model predictions, domestic conditions such as population had a strong effect on setting LBSAps. The local government’s competitive effect was only partially visible. We revealed that municipalities adopted new policies according to their own domestic policies rather than whether the national government has adopted its policies.

Japan is now confronting the challenge of potential disasters which occur with low frequency while causing grave consequences. In face of severe disasters, paralysis of local governments often leads to poor performance with their emergency responses. To overcome such shortcoming, local governments have started drawing up the Business Continuity plan (BCP). In this paper, I look into the policy process of the BCP and unveil the main determinants in the process. Previous Iiteratures of disaster management focused primarily on the feasibility of certain plans, which neglects the theoretical underpinnings thus tends to be limited in universality. I contribute to the existing literature by developing theoretical model based on the theory of organizational structure, and I provide revealing empirical evidence on the administrative capacity in the policy process.

In the first half of the paper, I give a brief review over the research regarding the administrative capacity of organization and personnel. I conclude that the perspective of organization obtains superiorities over other approaches on the topic. I analyze the policy process of the BCP based on the vertical and horizontal organizational structure through which I derive three crucial hypothesizes. They are, the leader position, independence of organization, and network in organization. In the following part, I empirically examine the hypotheses based on survival analysis. The hypotheses regarding independence of organization and network in organization are proven empirically relevant. The analysis extends the theoretical and empirical knowledge on the policy process of the BCp. These insights apply to other polices of disaster management as well since they are resembling in nature. Finally, disaster management is a policy with low issue salience thus cannot be fully analyzed by political variables. The perspective advanced in this paper can be helpful to reconcile the diverse policy implications of the existing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to study the Ideal types of International Organization Governance and analyze their effectiveness. In the context of global governance, International Organization can be considered as one of the various actors.

However, unlike States, since the member states grant funding to the International Organizations, each secretariat is accountable for their works to stakeholders, and especially to member states. If they cannot successfully achieve this accountability, the member states have the ability to suspend their

contributions/support or, in the worst scenario, to withdraw, which may result in the failure of the International Organization.

For this reason, we have to take a closer look at the governance of the International Organization. It can be considered effective as a norm once the governance lead to “policy effectiveness.” Therefore, we need to suggest International Organization Governance as an analytical framework in order to ascertain whether or not it leads to “policy effectiveness.”

In view of this, four ideal types of International Organization Governance-based on the two elements of the “participation in policy-making process” and “oversight (accountability)” -are suggested and their function tested with case studies, ILO (International Labour Organization), World Bank and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). This paper finds that, in all cases, governance has a positive impact on policy.

This research indicates the economic importance of analyzing the risk of finance by use of the data of prefectural governments in consideration of factors of cohort in addition to the pay level and the management of the number of Officials.

Laspeyres Index has played a major role to control the pay levels since its disclosure. However, the effect of monitoring personnel expenses by Laspeyres Index should be re-examined as pay levels in local governments are lower. The personnel expenses inflation tends to be caused not by the pay level but by the rise in the average age of officials. Because of that, the local governments in urban areas had to put finance on a recovery track in the past. The research indeed shows such risks of finance by the factor of cohort which haven’t been examined by previous studies in fiscal economics.

The purpose of this article is to analyze what affects women’s descriptive representation in the metropolitan areas in Japan. Especially, this paper focuses on demand-side factors, such as electoral systems or political parties. There have been many works investigating reasons of women’s underrepresentation in Japan. But few use time-series and cross-sectional data and focus on the mechanisms of party politics. We create an original dataset of all the 1989-2017 local assemblies elections in twenty major cities. Using this data, we check the impact of demand-side factors. First, on average, female candidates are younger than male candidates. But this difference became smaller during this period because of increasing average age of female candidates. Second, there is little difference between female candidates’ winning rates and male contenders’ when the effect of the status, incumbents or not, is considered. Third, district magnitude does not increase the ratio of women in the district but gives opportunities for women to get seats. Fourth, a winning of a female newcomer is likely to occur in a district with open seats, where a number of incumbent candidates is below the district magnitude. Fifth, in districts where incumbent female candidates are running in the election, party leaders are unwilling to nominate a new female candidate. These results suggest that so-called ‘incumbency advantage’ makes it hard for women to entry into the local assemblies, which leads to women’s underrepresentation in Japanese urban areas.

This article focuses on large designated cities, and examines the factors that increases unsubsidized general public works loans. This article shows the following facts.

1) More comprehensive regional development project bonds were issued with higher public modifications’ share in the standard financial demand of Local Allocation Tax.

2) Even if the balance ratio was higher than usual and there was little money for public investment, the cities increased these public works loans.

3) The increase of debt service burden ratio reduced these public works loans. In conclusion, national government measures to increase unsubsidized general public works loans may disturb optimum resource allocation, even though these public works loans decreased with the economic stagnation that has continued after late 1990’s.