## Chapter 3: Roles and Future Development of MLIT Policies

Municipalities, communities and businesses, if they want to stay vibrant, should take a number of steps as described in the previous chapters: assessing their strengths and weaknesses, discovering "hidden" resources, identifying resources of strategic importance, creating the target scenario and setting goals, and diverting such resources to achieve these goals. Achieving vibrant communities and businesses is a major goal for Japan. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MLIT) should support these initiatives through its policies.

MLIT implements a wide variety of policies while pursuing the best mix and role-sharing among different entities concerned—local governments, residents, businesses, NPOs and others—for each policy issue. These policies are designed to respect the individuality and diversity of these entities while assuming that they conduct their activities on their own initiative. MLIT, for its part, needs to establish partnership with these entities and take a flexible and integrated approach to making good use of their innovative initiatives.

### Section 1. Roles of the public, community and private sectors

### 1. Various forms of role-sharing

## [Raising the awareness and stimulating the initiative]

The case studies suggest that community development initiatives are originated from a number of entities, including: voluntary groups of people interested in community development; local governments; and community development councils established with the encouragement of local governments.

Local governments offer financial and other support for initiatives by the community and private sectors. Some initiatives are prompted by the policies, blue prints or support measures that local governments put forward regarding regional development. There are some cases where the development of an expressway network has promoted local residents to review their community development.

Integrated improvement of a river and the townscape

In cases where the public sector has launched a community development initiative, it tries to involve the community and private sectors and encouraged them to play increasingly larger roles as the initiative progresses.

As the case studies suggest, initiatives by the community and private sectors and municipalities are sometimes prompted by basic policies, blue prints or support measures that the central government put forward regarding regional development. In other times, they are prompted by initiatives by other areas.

In the business sector, economic reform and other changes in government policies, regulations and procurement often serve as a catalyst for the development of new technologies and products. The public sector sometimes supports corporate partnerships and cooperation between industry and academia by providing necessary information.

## [Securing and developing human resources]

Leaders in community development come from diverse backgrounds. In other words, people’s backgrounds are not necessarily relevant to be such a leader. And they are not always natural leaders either. Rather, they often learn to be a leader in the on-going process of community development. Some entities even train community development leaders.

The public sector supports human resources development by such means as offering professional advice.