Public domain - Whole lot of shaking up going on, by Colin Talbot

20 Jul 06
Japan's Government Policy Evaluation Act bears a passing resemblance to Whitehall's Public Service Agreements. But it is part of a deeper and more extensive reform to take the politics out of public works

21 July 2006

Japan's Government Policy Evaluation Act bears a passing resemblance to Whitehall's Public Service Agreements. But it is part of a deeper and more extensive reform to take the politics out of public works

Japan's prime minister Junichiro Koizumi is perhaps best known in the West for his spectacular hairstyle, his love of Elvis and his radical attempts to reform the way Japan's government and public services work. His government is much less well known for one specific aspect of reform – the innocuous-sounding Government Policy Evaluation Act, passed in 2001.

In June, I travelled to Tokyo as a guest of Soumusho, the interior ministry, to speak at a conference reviewing the Act's progress four years on from its implementation in 2002.

The Act requires all government ministries and agencies to produce performance evaluations. And they do – to the tune of about 10,000 a year. This is, by any standards, a massive undertaking. It makes the 160 or so Public Service Agreement targets set for our central government ministries pale into insignificance. The Japanese do things in a very determined way.

The rhetoric surrounding the Act is very similar to that heard in many democratic capitals in recent years, as various forms of results reporting have been introduced – from the UK's PSAs to the United States' Government Performance and Results Act. Even the French, after seemingly considering all this 'performance' stuff to be some sort of Anglo-Saxon aberration, have now adopted a rather similar set of policies.

But as with many things Japanese, the surface appearance — omote — isn't always quite what is going on behind the scenes — ura. The Act is certainly a general attempt to introduce some sort of results reporting into Japanese public administration, but it also has a very specific target: Japan's public works programmes.

Public works in Japan have a unique role. From the middle of the 1950s, they played a crucial part in maintaining the stability of Japanese politics, helping to keep the Liberal Democratic Party in power for almost four decades. In the early 1990s, this role was exposed in a series of corruption scandals, but these were only a symptom. The underlying problem was that Japan's whole

post-war political system was built, at least partly, on the systematic use of extensive public works to 'buy' votes and influence for the LDP, especially in the rural areas favoured by the electoral system.

Thus, the Act is focused on reforming a key element of the Japanese system — the nexus of the public works bureaucracy, construction companies and politicians, who traditionally have used these projects to garner support. So, out of 10,000 evaluations a year, around three-quarters are focused on cutting public works, partly or completely — by more than half before the projects have even started.

This is a very different context from the introduction of PSAs here, the nearest equivalent policy. PSAs have been about delivery in an expanding public sector, especially the crucial areas of health, education and criminal justice.

And the differences are not just contextual. Japan, like most other democracies, does these things by law, just as the Americans and the French have passed performance legislation in recent years. Here, the whole system is based on executive whim and can be swept away tomorrow without so much as a nod in Parliament's direction.

The other obvious difference between the Japanese evaluations and PSAs is the volume of information. While our government claims that we have only about 160 PSA targets now, this is dubious. Anyone reading them immediately spots that most of them are multiple measurements wrapped up as a single statement, and therefore portrayed as one target.

However, even with this weird system, our executive produces nothing like 10,000 (although we do produce similar amounts of performance data across the whole public sector).

The Japanese version may well evolve into more of a results management system, but at the moment it has a much more specific target, one that could have long-term consequences for Japan's already turbulent political scene. If it does, Koizumi will have left a legacy of change that will be felt in Japanese politics and public management for years to come.

Colin Talbot is professor of public policy and management at Manchester University's Centre for Public Policy and Management

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