South Korea’s Decentralization: Experience and Lessons from President Moon’s Initiatives

Abstract

A central campaign of President Moon, Jae In’s Government was to make strong progress on decentralization. This was in response to the realization that an institutional mechanism of a balanced distribution of authority is a requisite to establish a stable and fair society. The basic approach for authority allocation is to expand the institutional arrangement for a democratically competitive system. Contrast to past governments where authority allocation’s focus was on the institutional arrangement between the central and local government, President Moon’s Government emphasized an institutional arrangement securing a competitive system between the representative and the residents. The Decentralization Master Plan encapsulated this philosophy and associated strategies. This principle also melted into the contents to expand resident rights within the comprehensive amendment to the Local Autonomy Act. Major achievements of this initiative include (1) the comprehensive amendment to the Local Autonomy Act, (2) the enactment of the Omnibus Regional Transfer Law, (3) adoption of the Local Police System, and (4) implementation of the 1st Stage in Fiscal Decentralization. In pursuing these decentralization activities, the following lessons emerged. First, Government’s political will and intent is extremely important. Particularly, the President’s will is most important. This is because decentralization is fundamentally a problem of power reallocation. It is also an unstructured problem. Thus, pushback occurs from political parties and among government agencies. To overcome this, the most senior decision-maker’s attention and will is extremely important for a bureaucratized government organization culture. Second, formulation of policy discourse is indispensable. For the unstructured problem and the power reallocation problem, policy discourse formulation is extremely important to secure policy appropriateness. The Policy Discourse Formulation Group comprised of main committee members, professional members, operation of a taskforce team, and advisory member all centered around the Presidential Committee on Autonomy and Decentralization played an important role. Third, precise evaluation instrument (implementation instrument) is needed. Although government agencies are subject to decentralization performance evaluations, the majority of the tasks are inseparable from legislative tasks in generating results. Thus, it is more effective to employ an evaluation framework where evaluation is on implementation efforts using a process evaluation index rather than a framework on goal fulfillment. Fourth, it is important to maintain trust among agencies associated with decentralization. Power allocation problem entails sharply opposing interests among political parties in the legislative body and among government agencies outside of the Government. It is vital to communicate and share information among relevant institutions along with a balanced work implementation in order to form trust within policy implementation. The trust maintaining process contributes to mitigating opposition.