Professional Approaches to Policy Making - Beyond New Public Management -

The objective of the symposium is to identify good practices and skills in policy making process. Our working assumption is that there are certain competencies (skills) that are common to policy makers across policy areas as well as countries. These competencies are, in our view, different from technical knowledge of specific areas and not limited to managerial skills that we can learn from the private sector. Also, this set of skills should reflect new demands for policy development, such as higher speed, deeper expertise, and cooperation among international, regional, national and local authorities. In order to reach what these skills and competencies are, we will rely on a bottom-up approach (accumulate case studies and draw general principles from these cases) rather than to start from a theoretical framework, because this approach will shed light not only individual skills but also on the contextual background and make it easier for outsiders to grasp the real meaning of these skills and practices.

This symposium is timely in Japan for two reasons. The first is that the Japanese Government is now planning major change in its Civil Service System. It envisages to introduce competency-based system in the place of current position-based system. Identifying good practices and skills in modern policy making environment will provide foundation for designing competency framework. Secondly, many Japanese universities are now considering to establish graduate schools of public affairs. Comparative research on policy development cases will offer good teaching materials to these schools.