ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the potential of nonprofit government partnerships as a means of promoting citizen involvement as “co-production” at the local level in Japan. In recent years, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to the involvement of nonprofit organizations in the provision of public services and their partnerships with local government. In some cases, local citizens who were originally consumers of public services have set up nonprofit organizations and actually become the producers of services—in other words, “consumer-producers” (Parks et al. 1999)—in order to improve and control the quality of services. Such a system of provision can be regarded as “co-production” (Ostrom, 1996; Parks et al., 1999; Pestoff, 2006, 2008).
