The adoption process of the “Japanese DMO” policy and its transferability to developing countries — through the lens of policy transfer.
Hamid Reza MirmojarabianGraduate School of International Media, Communication & Tourism Studies, Hokkaido UniversityDoctoral Research
The Central Question
A DMO is, by nature, a “local” entity, rooted in its own community — so horizontal transfer from abroad should be difficult. Yet under a national registration system modeled on other countries, 300+ regions in Japan adopted it.
Why, and how, was a concept that should resist transfer received so widely?
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A Three-Layer Analytical DesignTracing the concept from nation to locality
Macro ／ National Policy Discourse
How the concept rose into national policy
Tracing how “DMO” entered domestic policy discourse and what meanings it was given along the way.
Four major newspapers (2012–2015)Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) analysis
Meso ／ Mediation to Central Government
Who carried the concept in from abroad
Focusing on the mediators who brought DMO knowledge from countries such as Spain and Switzerland into central government, and how the concept was framed and presented both upward (to government) and downward (to local practitioners).
Semi-structured interviews with policy entrepreneursAnalysis of early official documents
Micro ／ Local Reception
How regions made it their own
Who became the carriers of the concept, what barriers they faced, what facilitated its reception — and how a region reworked this “foreign” idea into something of its own, drawn from the accounts of those who lived it.
Semi-structured interviews with pioneer DMO practitionersSample expanding
Theoretical Anchor
Dolowitz & Marsh (2000)
A comprehensive framework that analyses policy transfer through multiple lenses, rather than as a simple “transferred or not” binary. This study works chiefly along two of them to read how the concept was transformed.
Degree of transfer — copying · adaptation · hybrid · inspirationConstraints — resources · institutions · knowledge …
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A Map of the Prior ResearchWhere this study stands in the field
Premise ／ Source of the paradox
The DMO is “local”
Beritelli, Bieger & Laesser (2007)
Destination governance is an autonomous affair sustained by local stakeholder collaboration. This supplies the very premise of the paradox: a thing that should resist transfer.
↳ The study’s point of departure
Framework ／ Theoretical spine
The policy-transfer framework
Dolowitz & Marsh (2000)
The analytical axes for reading the degree and the constraints of transfer. The theoretical spine of this research.
↳ The axis of analysis
Reframed ／ A new reading
The “ambiguity” of Japan’s DMO
Nagai, Doering & Yashima (2018)
Documents a reception marked by confusion and contestation, and a fuzzy definition. This study recasts that ambiguity not as a flaw but as a trace of transformation.
↳ Re-explained as a dynamic process
The applicant has already taken a first step into these gaps
★ The Applicant’s Achievement ／ Peer-reviewed
A Study on the Policy Transfer Process of DMOs in Japan
Journal of the Japan International Tourism Association, Vol. 33, 2026 (peer-reviewed)
Within a seemingly top-down structure, it found that what actually drove the transfer was local initiative and public acceptability — and demonstrated that the Dolowitz & Marsh framework extends beyond state-to-state transfer to the one-to-many relationship between a national government and its localities.
This doctoral research carries that finding outward into the meso layer (policy entrepreneurs) and the macro layer (newspaper discourse).
Moving past “transferred or not,” it shines a light on the degree of transformation a concept undergoes in crossing borders, refining policy-transfer theory.
ii
For Japanese society
It reframes the DMO — celebrated yet uneven in outcome — not as a failure of import but as the inevitable, place-specific reception of an idea.
iii
For the world & developing countries
It opens knowledge of practical use: the point is not the import itself, but how a society lets a borrowed idea take root in its own context.