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

日本政府与非营利组织关系的主要特点是政府经常将公共政策的执行过程外包给非营利组织，这与美国的情况非常相似。但在日本的案例中，非营利组织对政府的依赖性很强，日本的非营利组织往往被视为准政府组织。因此，政府与非营利组织之间的关系不透明、不平等、不有效，使公共服务变得昂贵和不负责任。这些日本传统关系正面临着从根本上改变自身的压力，以便日本非营利组织能够作为解决新的社会问题的主要代理人之一发挥现在所期待的重要作用。第一个条件是政治家对公共行政的领导，这是政府变革机制必要的有效运作。非营利组织可以利用政治家来制衡公共管理的权力。第二个条件是非营利组织部门的多层次结构，其中包括从倡导组织到业务型非营利组织的各种类型的非营利组织。无论是对个别非营利组织还是整个非营利组织而言，战略能力都是不可或缺的。幸运的是，这几年我们可以看到这些条件在日本出现的迹象。政府变革机制在国家政府，特别是地方政府中开始发挥作用。日本的非营利组织正试图与政府就政府与非营利组织关系中各方的行为准则达成一致。《爱知协作规则手册2004》就是其中的一个例子。

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.