For the purpose of establishing a practical typology which is suitable for local circumstances and an evaluation model of governance level, this research defined a positive local governance as ‘Good-Local Governance’ and, by deriving major charact...
For the purpose of establishing a practical typology which is suitable for local circumstances and an evaluation model of governance level, this research defined a positive local governance as ‘Good-Local Governance’ and, by deriving major characteristics from local innovative entities based on their consciousness on governance, proposed an evaluation model of Good-Local governance. The model is also tested on the governance of Wonheuongee Eco-cultural Activity from which the results were taken and analyzed.
To uphold the credibility of the raw data and the analysis, a research team was organized and operated for fine selection of cases and collective discussions were performed. Core participants in the governance were invited to the team to practically collect the data, scrutinize the cases, monitor the research procedure and design of investigation, and interpret the results.
The concept and definition, developmental elements, compositional variables of governance could be interpreted and expressed variously according to subject, perspective, timing, time, etc. as their variables. Based on the understanding on three major elements, ‘Organizational structure, decision making, credibility’, the changes of these three elements were categorized, and the evolution and levels are compared and evaluated in terms of the Good-Local Governance model.
‘Good-Local Governance’ was defined as a locally sprouted and matured ‘Good Governance’ for the local development with a positive collaboration within the network of various participant groups such as government bodies, entrepreneurs, scholars, media, NGOs, who are all rooted in the local society.
Civil society-oriented governance (a type categorized by perspective) and Participation Governance (by interpretation) are turned out to be the most suitable types of local governance based on the answers of questionnaires to local innovation leaders. The analysis on the necessity level of major elements showed two distinctive characteristics; 1) multi-collaboration decision making by raising issues, making organic discussions, and providing solutions and alternatives in policy with the efforts of establishing small group councils reflecting the tendency of segmentation and professionalism of civil desires by positive participation of various local entities such as professionals, civil activists, citizens, and government bodies, and 2) credibility based Good-Local Governance on the foundation of self understanding.
An evaluation model of governance level was proposed based on the typology and analysis throughout the process, i.e. selection of subject - accumulation of data - basic analysis - in-depth investigation design – analysis modeling and interpretation of results, and applied to the case study.
The governance of Wonheuongee Eco-cultural Activity was chosen by the criteria of case selection and evaluated by the proposed evaluation model.
In terms of the research methodology, there was a limitation, different from existing researches on governance evaluation, in deriving process of evaluation elements. But a new analysis method was introduced by categorizing the basic units of analysis into ‘Ideal’ and ‘Fact’. The participants themselves named overall governance activities into 4 stages (Conflict·Plan·Formation·Management), documented all events (487 incidents) in a form of diary, and selected major incidents (22) as the sample for analysis. For every incident, ‘Ideal’ was set according to the ‘multi-networking organization level’ and ‘decision-making influence level’ and the deviation with the ‘Fact’ was used to evaluate the level of governance. The evaluation model used in this research showed the possibility of deriving empirical results through setting respective criteria according to distinctive characteristics of the subjects.
The analysis on the ‘level of credibility’ amongst 3 key analysis elements was performed on major credibility items such as ‘co-dependency’, ‘expectation’, ‘risk-taking’ etc. of their development progress at each stage.
The results suggested that the changes of deviation between ‘Ideal’ and ‘Fact’ in organization variety, the level of multi-networking organization and decision-making influences are distinctively converges near zero, i.e. evolve into a very positive situation, but the level of credibility does not show any meaningful changes throughout the stages. In the collective discussion on the results, a question on the narrow range of in-depth study and necessity of further study on effective evaluation on credibility level were raised.
Moreover, it is limited for generalizing the various circumstances of all governances based on this research in that only three compositional elements were studied. However, considering the ripple effect and influences of civil-originated governance (urban community problem-solving governance, Wonheuongee Eco-cultural Activity) and, on the contrary, the current situation with various controversial and conflict-generating nation-wide development projects, this study assumes its stance to minimize trials and errors and exhausting debates.
Necessary on the basis of this research are further study on the definition of ‘Good-Local Governance’ and additional works of applying the proposed evaluation model to other cases to seek for possible enhanced-applicability.