Introduction.

As the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been attracting attention in recent years, the importance of specific “Regional” initiatives, including by local governments, has become a topic of discussion. Many Japanese municipalities are being requested to solve the social problem of dealing with a declining population due to the low birthrate and aging society, but the optimal solution regarding population size, composition, and attributes, which should act as the basis or premise for sustainable regional development, is not necessarily clear. It is also difficult to say what is the best basic policy for the national land structure, whether it should be multi-polar, unipolar, or multi-centralized.

The people who drive the sustainable development of a region consist of various attributes, such as children, youth, women, the elderly, and foreigners, and some have created new theories of regional development by adjusting the criteria of classification or aggregation of these attributes. Of course, there are complex phenomena in the details of each of these attributes. For example, women and the elderly are not a monolithic group and they form a diverse picture. Therefore, it is fair to say that a highly accurate analysis essentially requires indicators that correspond to such complexity.

Local Order Index

The Local Order Index (LOI), which is the main focus of this website, first of all seeks “Indicators that influence the sustainable development of a region” in the “Population problems” in its basic part. What is the best mix of population with what attributes and in what proportions that will promote regional development or risk triggering regional decline? The LOI is a set of indicators that explains this interest, and we would like to create it.

Local Order is intended to be social norms including legal information in the broadest sense, and may refer to the impact of a particular legal system on a region, or may refer to the underlying social realities or, if you prefer, spatial laws that bring forth that legal system.

Regional development theory may give the impression of assuming a steadily rising population, but this website attempts to introduce the concept of “Risk” seen in the fields of finance and crisis management into regional development theory. Although not necessarily the same, the fields described as Urban Resilience and Urban Geopolitics are considered to share similar interests. In this sense, we do not reject conventional development theories, and in fact, we would like to refer to them. However, the development theory in a declining population is intended to take care of the subtle context of population movement, and in that sense, we would like to introduce the concept of “Risk,” which is considered to have a more prudence conception.

International Risks

The risks that trigger regional decline do not necessarily originate from the national or lower local scales. Rather, there is a context that stems from an international or global scale that transcends the national context, and international cooperation and regional responses by countries and regions based on the recognition of risks at such scales are important. We will position the risks as international risks and deepen the recognition of such risks. The deepening is assumed to be reflected as a part of the Local Order Index.

Issues in AY2021

There are a wide range of issues to be addressed, but in AY2021 we would like to address the issue of visualizing the geographical location of “Foreign human resources” in the regional population, which has been discussed as one of the measures to cope with a declining population, especially through the use of a “Geographic Information System (GIS)”. Through this initiative, we hope to clarify a part of Japanese demographic composition in the global society, thereby serving as a hub of information for solving social issues.