The Korea Local Administration Review

This paper explores Seoul city's policy formation process concerning jobsecurity of public sector non-regular workers, praised for its better impact onworkers than those in the past, applying Kindon's Multiple streams framework.First, in the problem stream, despite of the continued questions on non-regularworkers' low wages and benefits, and extreme insecurity, the local governmenthad a legitimate excuse - budget and institutional restraint - not to improvethe employment conditions of non-regular workers. Second, in the politicsstream, the newly elected mayor Park Won Soon, putting forward his “policyentrepreneur” persona, pushed for local solutions on this problem, which turnedthe city administration's previously passive and unfavorable attitude towardsnon-regular workers over. The coupling of these two streams made thenon-regular worker problem Seoul city's agenda. Lastly, in the policy stream,there were agreed-on policy instruments from the national policy levelconcerning the non-regular workers, to be utilized in reshaping the policydiscussion for an advanced local policy. Also policy ideas presented byresearchers who had advocated non-regular worker protection in this streamcould offer concrete alternatives for the improvement of workers’ conditions.With this advance development in specific policy ideas on his side, “Park WonSoon" acted as “a policy entrepreneur with the official status” to strongly forgethe coupling of three streams. The findings showed the importance of a policyentrepreneur with an official position and of the long matured policy ideas. Also,multiple streams framework, mostly used for the national-level policy formationin Korea, proved to be applicable on the local-level policy research as well.
□ Keywords: multiple streams framework, non-regular worker, policy entrepreneur