This study asks how rural municipalities lobby their central governments to secure local human resources focusing on the cases in Japan and South Korea.

Rural municipalities in both South Korea and Japan commonly face the problem of labor shortage in their local industry in the age of aging and population decrease. To secure their local human resources, the municipal governments in the two countries have lobbied their central governments to launch new policy frameworks to encourage urban-to-rural migration. In responding to the lobbying by the rural municipalities, the central governments in South Korea and Japan have launched supporting system to encourage their urban dwellers to migrate to rural areas.

Local governments' lobbying on the central one, so-called intergovernmental lobby, has been researched in huge number of previous studies. However, most of them have focused on local governments' lobbying for financing by central ones. To recruit local human resources, different policy approach can be employed.

As a result of the author's analysis based on literature review and interview on local officers in the two countries, it was revealed that the municipal governments in rural Japan lobby the central government by forming policy coalition with their local partners such as the chamber of commerce and agricultural cooperatives. On the other hand, the municipal governments in rural Korea supplement their policy capacity with academic institutions such as universities and think tanks. This result indicates that local governments can employ and mobilize different instruments for different policy goals in the context of intergovernmental lobbying.

Authors:
Akio Nawakura, National Federation of Depopulated Municipalities in Japan, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Nawakura Akio is currently a senior researcher in the National Federation of Depopulated Municipalities in Japan, Tokyo. He graduated Graduate School of Meiji University with Ph.D. in Political Science in 2016.

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Akio-Nawakura-2228231542

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