論文(Article)

In a Japanese municipality (shi, cho, son), there is an administrative plan called “comprehensive plan”, that is formulated as an outline of the individual products of a municipality. Although the comprehensive plans of municipalities have often been discussed in public policy science, this study clarifies the significance and problems of such planning from a perspective of regional policy science. The results are summarized as follows: Comprehensive planning must be distinguished from municipal planning (the national land use planning of each municipality). Since modifying land use is easy to imagine, the future of urban landscape is likely to be emphasized in a comprehensive plan. Therefore, both plans are often treated in the same category and are similar in configuration and content. This similarity is the main factor that reduces the awareness of the comprehensive plan. The plan is done for about ten years. At the same time, elasticity is required to respond to social transformations. Thus, in order to design an elastic long-term plan, permanent ideals and flexible policies are both essential. The flexibility is achieved by a collaboration with residents, a process that takes advantage of social capital. Social capital is a broad, vague, and unstable concept. To accurately identify social capital, it is necessary to understand objectively the current state of a region. The most important issue for comprehensive planning is administrative assessment and its utilization. With the establishment of the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, and Act) cycle and the introduction of benchmarking, the administrative evaluation method for individual policies and projects is becoming more common. However, methods have not yet been established to gauge the relationship between projects and a plan. An objective assessment of this type requires a third-party evaluation. Some point out that the formulation of a comprehensive plan is the mere enumeration of an ideal. However, without ideals, the system cannot be codified. The regional policy conducted in a municipality is based on an ideal commensurate with regional conditions. Municipalities must present such a concept to understand the future of their regions and to formulate their comprehensive plans.