The Korea Local Administration Review

Along with an increasing interest in social innovation, theoretical and practical discussions have been developed in various aspects, from what social innovation is and how to realize it in practice. This study understands participatory local governance from a procedural aspect for local social innovation, where diverse local actors are involved to set common agendas at the local level and find innovative solutions through collaborative deliberation. In reality, local governments promote various socio-economic policies (projects) to solve diverse local problems. In this process, they emphasize to build collaborative governance. Therefore, these various socio-economic policies pursued for solving local problems can be understood in terms of contents, while participatory and collaborative local governance can be understood as a process. The main argument of this study is that the structure and strategies of such participatory and collaborative local governance should have a social-innovation-friendly form that can promote social innovation
Therefore, this study develops a theoretical discussion on the relationship between local governance and social innovation, and conducts case studies to analyze the characteristics of the governance structure and social innovative strategies in Seongbuk-gu and Hongseong-gun. The study finds that the two cases both establish a participatory governance structure and try to make efforts to expand participation of various local actors. In addition, the two cases have developed various experiments in terms of socially innovative strategies such as meeting social needs through the establishment of clear goals, implementing new ideas, promoting social practice capacities, cross-sectoral interaction, and open and collaborative networking. At the same time, the study also finds several problems and limitations of the two cases. Based on this case analysis, finally, this study seeks the role of participatory local governance as an enabling environment for social innovation, and provides future policy suggestions.