Civic Duty For Community Development: A Case Of Duty‐Based Approaches In Japan

For a long time, donors have been keen to reform local governance in low‐income countries by promoting the realisation of people's rights at the grass roots. This often goes together with the strengthening of civil society. Japan is one of the donors which endorse this approach, but its own local governance, unlike that of other advanced industrialised countries in the West, is strongly built upon people's sense of civic responsibility. Although Japan's civil society is commonly believed to be weak, it enjoys a strong network of neighbourhood‐based associations that serves as an institutional mechanism for generating a sense of civic duty. This article explores the possibility of integrating the notion of civic duty in community development in countries where the state–society nexus can similarly be mediated by locally embedded institutions in place of mission‐driven non‐governmental organisations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.