The Strategic Planning for Regional Sustainability in Prefectural Cross-Border Areas Project－An interdisciplinary research project with the San-En-Nanshin Region as a study areaAbstract
In this paper, we give an overview of a research project "Strategic Planning for Regional Sustainability in PrefecturalCross-Border Areas", formed by Toyohashi University of Technology and Aichi University which is a local private liberalarts university. The project was started in 2006 based on the idea of a cost sharing collaborative project with various publicand community organizations (MEXT special fund).
First, we give the outlines of the study area, the San-En-Nanshin Region, and the overview of the activities
undertaken in this project. We present the research background and aims of the "Strategic Plan for the Eco-RegionalDevelopment", the efforts and achievements to date, and finally describe the strategic plan which constitute the ultimate
goal of this project.
The main contention herein, even though the regional issues discussed in this project are in a fairly limited field, andwhile the strategic plan mentioned here does not imply a systematic plan, the results from this project show that in order tosuccessfully put into practice the measures to ensure the conditions and policies for sustainability drawn from individual
studies, the existing institutions and frameworks and especially new management strategies for regional public-private
partnerships that cross municipal or prefectural administrative boundaries are needed, and the concept of total managementof existing local grassroots activities through networking and collaboration is essential for Japan’s regional levelcommunity development.
For the San-En-Nanshin area which comprises the Toyogawa and Tenryu River basins, the main natural resourceis the forests, but on the other hand, the rural areas are suffering from a decline in the forestry industry, aging, and severe
progression of depopulation. In these rural areas, a wide variety of efforts by the local government as well as NPOs andvolunteer groups aimed at dealing with local issues can be seen. However, even in this age of information driven society,information on these efforts has not been fully disseminated and there is no visible effect from these efforts. For an effective
implementation of regional policy, for example to better facilitate immigration through the various efforts related toimmigration, it is necessary to form a horizontal network of these activities, and there is need for a strategic managementwith a unified policy for the urban, rural farms and the rural mountainous areas.
The San-En-Nanshin area is a pioneering region in the implementation of concrete projects. It has a vision for aprefectural cross-border cooperative development created through collaboration between the public and private sectors,
and it also has an organization to oversee the successful implementation of the vision. The “Think and Do-tank” being
contemplated for institutionalization by MLIT is an entity formed through public-private partnership with a certain amountof semi-governmental authority and is expected to oversee the regional development strategies from the planning stage toimplementation, is equivalent to the "Regional Development Strategy Promotion entity" that has been envisaged in thisproject. From institutionalization of entities of this kind, it is expected that the concept of total management and the practiceproposed here will become a reality.