Personnel Exchange with Government Agencies | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management
2024.05.27
This may not be widely known, but the Faculty of Policy Management and the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies welcome active national civil servants as faculty members. This is known as "personnel exchange with government agencies." The Faculty of Policy Management has personnel exchanges with the National Police Agency, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and the Ministry of Defense, while the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies has exchanges with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Ministry of the Environment. An exchange with another new government agency will begin soon.
Each of these personnel exchanges has a history. The longest-running one is with the National Police Agency, which began in April 2006. We are now welcoming our ninth faculty member from the agency. The next is with the Ministry of the Environment, which started in April 2007, and we are now on our seventh faculty member. The exchange with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications began in November 2014, and we are now on our fourth. The one with the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare started in April 2017, and we are on our third. And the exchange with the Ministry of Defense began in April 2024.
Although they are all fixed-term faculty members with terms of about two to three years, they have successively carried on the torch of education and research at the Faculty of Policy Management, the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, and the Graduate School of Media and Governance. They are in charge of undergraduate and graduate lecture courses and research groups (so-called "zemi" or seminars), and they also contribute to faculty management, including internal administrative duties. And if we include the faculty members we welcome as part-time lecturers and specially invited faculty, the scope is even broader.
Why have the Faculty of Policy Management and the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies so carefully maintained these personnel exchanges over the years? One possible answer is that SFC's education focuses on "policy," and it is national civil servants who create that policy, but that does not seem to be the only reason.
As is well known, the concept of "policy" in SFC's education is broad. Recall the words of Hiroshi Kato, the first Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management: "When we hear the word policy, we immediately think of national policy, but what we mean by policy here is the choices and decisions people make to take some kind of action," and "Policy can be government policy, corporate decisions, or choices within the international community." Therefore, if we limit our understanding of personnel exchange with government agencies to a literal interpretation of welcoming national civil servants from "Kasumigaseki" as faculty, the education built through this exchange would seem to support only a very small part of SFC's education.
However, in SFC's education, the exchange with government agencies supports something much larger. Let's imagine SFC as a campus for learning about "national policy." If we ask what forces shape "national policy," a picture emerges where the power of so-called policy entrepreneurs—the power of non-profit organizations, academics and think tanks, social entrepreneurs, and corporations—interacts with administrative power to support the decisions of politicians, who are the policymakers. In the real world, the planning capabilities of Kasumigaseki alone do not shape "national policy."
It is precisely because SFC's education views "policy" in this multi-dimensional way that personnel exchange with government agencies is indispensable to SFC's education. The impact that active bureaucrats from "Kasumigaseki"—whose mission is to think about policy with an eye to the future and support the decisions of policymakers—have on SFC's education, which also aims to nurture policy entrepreneurs, should be completely different from the education that university faculty can provide. The act of creating and implementing "policy" cannot be completed by policy entrepreneurs alone.
There is also another objective. If "policy" in the real world is no longer created solely by the planning capabilities of "Kasumigaseki," then we hope that having active Kasumigaseki bureaucrats serve as faculty at SFC in the middle of their careers (not at the end) will provide an opportunity for them to reconsider "what skills are necessary for bureaucrats who think about policy with an eye to the future."
Furthermore, just as the significant flux in domestic and international environments is prompting changes in career design, the mobility of people and knowledge is increasing, including a rise in talent mobility between the public and private sectors. Students are well aware of this reality. In addition to the career path of delving deeply into one area and striving for a single peak, a way of life that enriches one's career by moving back and forth between different fields, like a revolving door, will likely become more common. In such an era, seeing active bureaucrats who think about policy up close should hold great significance for students.
The scholarship at SFC is one that, while being well-versed in individual advanced academic fields, re-examines them comprehensively and ventures into interdisciplinary areas for problem-solving. SFC, which engages in this, remains a pioneering and unconventional space compared to traditional education and research. The exchange between such an SFC and Kasumigaseki will mark its 20th anniversary in two years. It has built an era. This exchange has already produced various results, but it still holds immense potential. I hope that the personnel exchange with government agencies will continue to develop as a new form of education and research at SFC.