Basic Report

The purpose of this study is to improve emergency management system in Koreanlocal government. In this paper, we discuss institutions and implementation ofemergency management system in Korean local government. For this, we review andanalyze the literatures on emergency management in Korea.We recognized that the frequency and degree of emergency are increasing as timegoes on. In addition, impact of the emergency is beyond local government's boundaryand it is not easy for local government itself to manage the emergency case.First, with regard to system integration, central government officially operates theintegrated system, but the system integration in the central government is notcompleted. Moreover, local government has not had a official integrated system, buta separated one.Second, in the organization perspective, there is an internal communication gapbetween fire administration bureaucracy and general administration bureaucracy.Although emergency task is closely related to official's speciality, first of all,emergency task is just assigned and circulated regardless of official's specialty. Next,there is lack of response capacity in the emergency field. In particular, emergencycooperation is not easy if emergency team is composed of with the non-specialists.Also, it is important to get a strong support from the chief officials because the chiefofficials do not give the first priority to emergency management.Third, in terms of emergency cooperation, the cooperation system does not worksince the local government does not have any power to mobilize emergencymanagement resources. Even if emergency happens, the local government does nothave any authority to utilize military and police emergency equipment. Thus, we canspeak emergency response is beyond the local government's ability.Fourth, related to professionalism, the local government official's frequent jobrotation would be a barrier to have a know-how about emergency administration. Aswe see in the case of HEBEI SPIRIT Vessel in TaeAn, 2007, emergency expertise isimportant and it is not a limited matter only to local government.Based on the problematic issues above, most of all, local government has to buildup emergency management system in terms of professional officials and emergencyexpertise. For this, it is desperate for local government to have emergencymanagement authority through institutional rearrangement.Finally, the detailed strategies to operate the emergency management system in thelocal level are presented in this paper.￭