ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the type of SNG international engagement that has a harder strategic edge. International cooperation by SNGs evolved with the emergence of a new set of ideas, policies and institutions particularly through the late 1980s and 1990s. The growing involvement of SNGs in international-cooperation programmes therefore has a double edge of symbolism. The national government has established an institutional framework so that it can to some extent manage SNG involvement in international cooperation and the Foreign Ministry can maintain a firm hand on the nation’s foreign-policy rudder. In many ways the role of Japanese SNGs in international-cooperation programmes resembles the roles that some of their European and North American counterparts have been performing from the post-war period, in conjunction with, and independent from, their central governments.
