논문

The 1995 local election indicated a turning point in South Korea. It reflected a fundamental transition from an over-centralized state to a decentralized one. Since then, full-fledged local autonomy set sail with the newly elected 245 chiefs and thousands of local councillors of large and small local governments.
Two years have passed under what is called new age of local autonomy. As the concentrated political power begins to devolve, vivid changes have been taking place in central-local relations as well as within local governments, often creating undesirable side-effects. This paper addresses the changing relations between central and local governments in terms of vital aspects of decentralization such as structure, function and finance. An effort was also made to draw practical as well as theoretical implications from a decentralization experiment in South Korea.
There have been two contending models concerning how big a local government should be: they are the public choice model and the area-wide reform model. These two models greatly help Korean citizens and their policy-makers decide how big local governments should be and design the appropriate governmental structure in metropolitan areas. The recent proposal by the Ministry of Interior to eliminate the district councils in the six largest cities, however, seems to take the position of reform model. It could weaken the function of the district governments which are the lower-tier units to the metropolitan-wide governments.
Many critical local services are not included in the functional inventory of South Korean local governments. For instance, the city government doesn't have any right and responsibility for crime control, fire prevention and traffic regulation which are essential for managing the city. Thus local governments demands that many functions carried out by the central government should be handed over to them. The bureaucrats in the central government, however, are strongly against devolving the governmental functions to local governments for fear of losing their power. They tend to presume the redistribution of governmental functions as a power game.
The weak fiscal capacity of local governments has not been improved much since the 1995 local election. The newly elected local leaders attempted to figure out how to expand the sources of local revenue in vain. The central government was particularly reluctant in implementing the financial decentralization. Many proposals to change the current tax assignment system, for instance, have not been accepted.
It could be said that local autonomy is more than an elected local government, but a way of life based on a set of values that constitutes a political culture. Those values, which are essential for self-governance and democracy, must be cultivated by providing institutional and procedural frameworks for political participation. Therefore, the recent experiences in local autonomy will certainly contribute to germinate a set of values which are essential to create a new political culture of self-governance in South Korea.