Policy Praxis for Reverse-Engineering Systemic Failure:

Revisiting The Failure of Civil Society? (2009) for Redesigning Co-Production Governance

Akihiro Ogawa, Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia

Fifteen years ago, my award-winning monograph The Failure of Civil Society? (2009; originally submitted as a dissertation to Cornell University Department of Anthropology in 2004) argued that Japan’s Non-Profit Organization (NPO) boom was a state-led project creating “volunteer subjectivity” to mobilize low-cost labor under the guise of co-production. Today, the dissolution of thousands of NPOs in Japan underscores this structural fragility. To address this crisis, we must move beyond the virtue narrative that assumes NPOs are inherently effective. Instead, I apply what I call Policy Praxis through Institutional Reverse-Engineering (Busetti 2023). Drawing on Critical Failure Studies, I treat failure not as an accident but as an “ethnographic category” (Alexander 2023) that reveals hidden infrastructures. I reverse-engineer the debris of failed co-production—specifically mechanisms of resource dependence and NPO-ization—to identify the causal chains that turned citizens into subcontractors. My project reverses these mechanisms to propose a new model: the Regenerative Co-Production Model, which replaces state-defined volunteerism with “civic knowledge” (shimin chi; Ogawa 2015)—experiential knowledge generated by citizens to solve community problems independently of state directives. By redesigning governance to ensure financial independence and adversarial co-production, we can transform civil society from a fragile service provider into a resilient, critical innovator. Failure is not an endpoint; it is the blueprint for redesign.

Bio

Akihiro Ogawa is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia. He completed his PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2004. Akihiro subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University (2004–2006) and taught at Stockholm University, Sweden (2007–2015), before taking the current position in 2015. His research focuses on civil society and politics in Japan and Asia, as well as the anthropology of policy. His publications include The Failure of Civil Society? (2009), Lifelong Learning in Neoliberal Japan (2015), and Antinuclear Citizens (2023), and edited volumes such as the Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia (2017) and Varieties of Civil Society Across Asia (2024), among others. He leads the Asian Civil Society Research Network (https://asiancivilsociety.com/), and he is currently on a cross-appointment at Kyoto University as a Research Professor.