Nowadays, the number of conflicts has been increasing with the advancement of urban development projects at the local level of Japan. They are recently observed among neighborhood residents, developers, and administrative authorities. Any municipalities in Japan gotlegally required to draw up their own "city master plans" so that they could present their prospects of urban planning for the future. In spite of that, why do the contents of city master plans come to lose touch with the initial consensus in some situations? In the same way, several scholars have recently emphasized that the right for residents to participate in planning process should be practically realized. On the ground of the background mentioned above, the purpose of this research is to consider an effectiveness of city master plans inlocal governance. In the light of such an aim, this paper, through using a case study method, investigated whether or not city master plans actually worked for maintaining good governance and explored an effective way of enhancing monitoring functions on the planning process. First of all, in an examination of influences exercised by political actors over policy change, a case of partial revision of city master plan in Higashikurume City, Tokyo, illustrated to what extent residents possess the monitoring capabilities. As a result of consideringthis case, two assumptions would be proposed. One is that local governance in the process of city planning depends on political situations besides socio-economic environments around the municipality. The other is that the local chief executive has the most leverage over decision-making in the urban planning process of all political actors; or rather,the city mayor's decision-making, not only institutionally but also operationally, plays a critical role in the revision of city master plans. In addition to that, the author, later in this paper, also examined three cases in the context of tasks which were considered to need to utilize and promote the contents of city master plans. In consequence, it was assumed that what would be required to realize and leverage the contents of city master plans was summed up in two conditions: maintenance of executive system in the municipal office and establishment of collaboration with residents.