 JLGC News, April - May
New staff arrival.
Japan
Local Government Centre, London saw the arrival of three new members of
staff in April, to begin their secondments from Japanese local
authorities for the next two years.
Assistant Directors Kyoko
Yoshimoto from Takaoka City Government in Toyoma Prefecture (located in
the Hokuriku region on the north coast of the main Honshu island),
Atsuko Yamaguchi from Saga Prefectural Government (located in the
northwest part of the island of Kyūshū, in Japan’s south west), and
Shunya Hosogoe from Miyagi Prefectural Government (in the Tōhoku Region
on Honshu island, Japan’s north east) will be working on various
projects such as research and facilitating study requests from Japan’s
local authorities, supporting the JET Programme and the activities of
the alumni association, and the organisation of our various seminars
and study tour.
Visit to London Borough of Newham Dockside
In
May JLGC was invited by the Mayor of Newham Sir Robin Wales to visit
the East London borough to receive a presentation on the council’s
flagship Olympics regeneration projects and place making
strategy. The visit was part of our new Director’s introduction
to JLGC’s longstanding contacts in the local government sector and Mr Hanyu
was accompanied by Senior Adviser Shinichi Kawanago and Research
Manager Andrew Stevens.
Newham Council is now based in a new
central office complex adjacent to London City Airport, the building
itself resembling an airport terminal. The council believes that
by centralising its operations in one building it can generate
efficiencies of £12m this year and lower its carbon footprint,
providing better services as a result.
Meeting the
council’s director for regeneration Clive Dutton, they heard about the
council’s plans to turn its hosting the principal Olympics venues into
a realisable opportunity to regenerate the deprived parts of the
borough into a key hub for tech and low carbon businesses.
Indeed, the belt of land available for development from the dockside of
the Thames up to the Olympic Park’s northern fringe is comparable to
one third (or the length) of the island of Manhattan. The council
claims that £22bn of investment is in train for delivery by 2025,
including the Royal Docks enterprise zone, which will host a £60m
global sustainability centre by Siemens.
Finally,
the council hopes to build on the digital legacy of Olympics
facilitated super-fast broadband to become the second phase of the UK
Government’s flagship Tech City development. London has become a much sought destination for Japanese
visitors to JLGC as they familiarise themselves with how London is
hosting the 2012 Olympic Games.
Fukushima Symposium at DLA Piper Sheffield
JLGC
Director Yuichiro Hanyu and Communications Manager Keith Kelly attended
a symposium event at the Sheffield offices of DLA Piper 23 May,
looking at the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant, which exposed enduring questions about the safety and
reliability of nuclear energy, the capabilities of human beings to
predict and manage complex events, and the relationship between
humanity and nature. The international response to the disaster has
been varied; the UK position on nuclear power remains virtually
unchanged, while Germany has vowed to phase out nuclear generation
altogether by 2022. Japanese official policy is unlikely to phase out
nuclear power entirely, but a de facto phase out appears possible. In
May 2012 all of Japan's nuclear capacity were offline while undergoing
safety inspections.
Nuclear energy has been regarded as a
failsafe method of reducing human dependence on fossil fuels and
mitigating the worst impacts of climate change. The symposium asked
what the future holds for nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima
disaster, and what impacts there will be on plans to reduce carbon
emissions and combat climate change. Speakers included Wakako
Hironaka, former Director-General of the Environment Agency of Japan,
and Member of the House of Councillors (1986-2010); Jillian Creasy,
Elected Member of Sheffield City Council, Sheffield's first Green Party
Councillor; Jun Arima, Director-General, JETRO London; Neil Hyatt,
Professor of Nuclear Materials Chemistry, University of Sheffield;
Shinichi Kihara, Senior Energy Analyst, International Energy Agency,
OECD; and Teresa Hitchcock, Senior Partner, DLA Piper.
The
visit was also a chance for JLGC staff to meet with members of the
JET Programme Alumni Association (JETAA) to discuss supporting
activities for programme participants in the region, as well as staff
from Sheffield University to discuss possible collaboration on UK-Japan
research projects in the future, organised by Dr Peter Matanle of SEAS
at the university. JLGC were also met by Edward Highfield,
Director of Creative Sheffield, Sheffield City Council’s office for
economic development, with business growth as its core
activity. Sheffield City Council has a link with Kawasaki City
Government, the 20th anniversary of which was marked by a visit by
Mayor Takao Abe in 2011, which JLGC has helped to support.
Many thanks from JLGC to all those
in Sheffield who gave their time to meet with us, particularly to Dr
Peter Matanle at SEAS for the kind invitation to the symposium and
meeting arrangements.
Local Government Conference in Potsdam
On
20 April 2012, the Institute of Local Government Studies (KWI) at
Potsdam University held a conference on the theme of local government
reform and the changing relationship between state and local
government. JLGC has worked with KWI for some years, and Research and
Policy Manager Irmelind Kirchner travelled to Potsdam to attend.
Against
the background of a shrinking population and diminishing fiscal
resources, new attempts at adapting local government as well as Land
(state) administration to those realities are pursued not only in the
new Länder in the East, but also those Western Länder where local
government structures are based on small units. In fact, such
administrative reforms are always an attempt to reflect social,
political, economic and technological changes, which is the continuous
task of all government.
The conference looked at recent
examples of such reforms in Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Lower
Pomerania, while considering the topic from such differing angles such
as the legal requirements for reforms and the opposing pull of local
government as self-government based on citizen participation and
efficient service provider. Contributions came not only from the
academic side, but also from practitioners, in the presentations as
well as in the discussion. The conference also had a comparative angle,
where reforms in Germany where compared with those in France and the
UK.
Two things in particular emerged very clearly from the conference:
There
is a hotly debated question about priorities and order when pursuing
functional and territorial reforms: those pursuing reforms actively at
state level very often push the approach of territorial reforms (that
is, mergers and restructuring local government into geographically
bigger units), while those at the receiving end – the local politicians
and officials – as well as academics prefer the approach of defining
and reordering competences (Aufgabenkritik) before embarking on
territorial reforms.
Also, comparison of local government
in Europe leads to the conclusion that in the changing relationship
between state and local government in the main countries and the
pursuit of reform in nearly all countries is very much bound by the
existing national traditions and experiences – it is hard to see any
common European trends emerging, except for the fact that local
government reforms have been pursued in all countries.
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