A FRAMEWORK USING THE ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN JAPAN TO EVALUATE PROJECTS BASED ON OUTCOMES

Abstract

Currently, in Japan, women are required to participate and advance in the workplace because of the decline in the labor population. However, it is very difficult for them to do so because of the patriarchal system within Japanese history. In the 1990s, local governments began various projects to encourage women to participate in society. At the same time, local government administrations were introduced to project evaluation to boost the efficiency of their projects. However, project evaluation did not function well because project evaluation needs to be linked to outcomes of the program, and the outcome step was often performed independently. The purpose of this paper is to show how to perform project evaluation to promote women’s active participation in society in Japan. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, we show how to evaluate projects in a way that can connect to the outcomes of the program. This framework can also be used to calculate the degree of contribution of projects in the program from two perspectives. First, the decision makers in a local government evaluate the outcomes of the program and second, the people in charge of the projects that make up the program do the evaluation for their own projects. In this paper, we evaluated actual projects of a city in Japan and were able to show the direction they should take, such as reduction or expansion for each project in the next fiscal year, by using numerical values obtained in the process of calculation by this framework.