Nakano Koichi

This study seeks to contribute to the policy transfer literature through a comparison of the British "Next Steps" initiative of agencification (i.e., organizational separation of policy implementation from policy formulation in central departments) and the Japanese reform that officially proclaimed to be inspired by the British example. In addition to confirming the crucial role played by domestic structural constraints in producing variant outputs in different countries, this article also shows that the transfer of policy ideas can be a highly proactive political process in which political actors in the learning country interpret and define both problems and solution as they "borrow" from another country.

France saw historic decentralisation reforms under the leadership of Mitterrand and Defferre, his first Minister of the Interior in the 1980s. This article highlights the role played by ideology and elite networks in the reform process. Ideological renewal determined the broad direction of policy change towards decentralisation, and placed the decentralist cause at the heart of the legislative programme of the incoming Socialist government. Yet it was the networks that linked the political, administrative and local elites, more than ideology, that shaped and constrained the details of the actual reform outcomes.

It is a striking feature of Japan in the 1990s that nationalism and localism have been on the rise concurrently in the discourse of its political leaders. This apparent coexistence, even complementary reinforcement, of nationalism and localism represents a new development that needs to be accounted for. This study consists of a review of publications by the leading politicians of the 1990s (including Hashimoto, Miyazawa, Ozawa, Kaifu, Hosokawa, Takemura and Yokomichi). For purposes of analysis, different strands of nationalism and localism are identified according to the particular quality of the nation/localities in terms of which collective identity is asserted: sovereignty nationalism, uniqueness nationalism, competitiveness nationalism, autonomy localism and competitiveness localism. The survey reveals that nationalism and localism are compatible, even complementary, because the competitivist discourse is the predominant type in either case. To make both the state and the localities stronger would be an impossible goal, were it a question of sovereignty and autonomy - but as a matter of competitiveness, there is nothing contradictory in it. Unencumbered by the logic of a zero-sum game over preponderant rights for decision-making, the competitivist discourse claims that competitive localities are good for the nation as a whole as well as that a competitive nation is good for the international community as a whole. This faith of competition was revived by Ozawa, and is strongly linked with the New Right thinking. The ascendant position of the competitiveness-nationalist discourse indicates that Japanese nationalism increasingly aspires for integration in the international community, not exclusion or isolation as in the past. At the same time, even if decentralization is to be implemented, it will not be the ideals of local autonomy but the benefits of competitive localities to the competitive nation that will be foremost in the minds of many reformers.