Characterristics of Government-NPO Relationships in Japan and the Conditions for Transparent, Equal and Effective Collaboration

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The main characteristic of the government-NPO relationships in Japan is that the government often contracts out the implementation process of public policy to NPO, which is very similar to American case. But in Japanese case NPOs are strongly dependent on the government and Japanese NPOs are often considered as quasi governmental organizations. As a consequence the government-NPO relationships are not transparent, not equal and not effective and make public services costly and unresponsive.These Japanese traditional relationships are now under pressure to change themselves fundamentally so that the Japanese NPOs can play a now expected important role as one of the main agents in solving new social problemsAs a result of this research project we can point out as necessary conditions for the transparent, equal and effective collaboration between the government and NPOs as follows. The first condition is the leadership of politicians to the public administration, for which is necessary effective function of government change mechanism. NPOs could use politicians to counterbalance the power of public administration.The second condition is the miltitiered structure of NPO sector, which contains various types of NPO from advocacy organization to business type NPO. And the strategic ability is indispensable both for individual NPO and NPO sector as a whole.Fortunately we can find out signs of appearance of these conditions in Japan in these several years. The government change mechanism are beginning to function in national government and especially in local governments. And Japanese NPOs are trying to agree with governments about codes of conduct for each party in government-NPO relationship. Aichi rulebook 2004 for collaboration is one of these examples.