[October 2012]
The system of regional cooperation in Japan

On September 18th, I had a chance to talk about the system of regional cooperation used by the Japanese local government at the Centre for Local Government, University of Technology, Sydney.  It was one of the sessions within a three day program for council executives especially focused on shared services.

Historically, Japanese municipalities have developed regional cooperatives to deal with a lot of responsibilities. In terms of the methods of implementing regional administration, there are eight kinds of systems. All of them are based on Local Autonomy Law.

Among these, the major systems which many municipalities have adopted are Partial Cooperatives and Wide-area Cooperatives. Partial Cooperatives are organizations established by two or more local governments to deal with issues more efficiently and effectively. Wide-area Cooperatives are the organizations established to develop plans for affairs covering a large area and to handle these affairs comprehensively and systematically. These two regional cooperatives may be similar to County Council or Regional Organization of Councils.

The most frequent type of duties delegated to regional cooperatives are those of garbage disposal, sewage and fire services.  I used fire services as a good example for illustrating the merits of regional cooperatives. They can be better organized and enhanced by expanding the size of municipality fire services into regional cooperatives.

Immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, Emergency Fire and Rescue Teams from 44 other prefectures were instructed to mobilize to the main disaster areas of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures. Land based units and helicopter teams were engaged in search and rescue efforts, as well as fire extinguishing. Overall, Emergency Fire and Rescue Teams rescued more than 5,000 people. I think that is the great result of improved fire services throughout Japan.

Recently, as municipal amalgamations in Japan have occurred, this kind of nationwide, large-scale reorganization of municipalities has exerted an influence on the pattern of regional cooperation. Many regional cooperatives have been integrated into a larger municipality. In addition, Japan is becoming an aging society and the population of Japan has begun to decrease. People tend to live in big cities such as Tokyo. Under these conditions, rural areas in particular are slipping into a vicious cycle where facilities related to daily life such as schools and hospitals are becoming inconvenient to use, leading to further population decline.

The concept of Regional Alliances was promoted from the perspective of trying to stem the outflow of people from rural areas, and create a flow of people in the reverse direction, into rural areas.  Regional Alliances are meant to be formed as the result of an accumulation of one-to-one agreements concluded by their own initiatives between a core city and the surrounding municipalities.  They are not regulated by Local Autonomy Law, so they can select more flexible ways to implement their duties.  Regional Alliances somewhat look like the system of Strategic Alliances here in terms of their flexibility.

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  •  環境問題への取組を調査するため、7月下旬~8月上旬にかけて滋賀県立彦根工業高等学校の高校生1名および引率者1名がオーストラリアを訪問し、クレアシドニー事務所は、7月29日にはオーストラリアの概要(文化、風習等)についてブリーフィングを実施し、7月31日にはブリスベンの訪問先企業へのアテンド行いました。

    ブリスベンの訪問先においては、カーボンニュートラルの観点から、カギケノリという海藻を用いて畜産動物が排出するメタンガスを減少させる取り組みについての情報を得ることができました。生徒が、将来は自らも環境のための取り組みを実施したいとの思いから、積極的にミーティングに臨んでいる姿が印象的でした。

    当事務所は今回、ブリーフィング及びアテンドのほか、ブリスベンの訪問先企業に対するアポイントメント取得のサポートも行いました。
     クレアシドニー事務所は、今後もオーストラリアでの調査に取り組む日本の自治体の活動を支援していきます。

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