The national power in the 21st century will depend on the security of maritime jurisdiction and the use & development of the marine resources. In particular, as the maritime jurisdiction was expanded up to 200 NM(nautical mile), it may well be urg...
The national power in the 21st century will depend on the security of maritime jurisdiction and the use & development of the marine resources. In particular, as the maritime jurisdiction was expanded up to 200 NM(nautical mile), it may well be urgent for Korea to strengthen the maritime police power more than ever. With taking into effect of 1994 UNCLOS(United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), fierce competition is expected among coastal states in order to secure their marine resources and maritime jurisdiction.
KMPA(Korea Maritime Police Agency), a central administrative agency responsible for protecting maritime interest of Korea, is being confronted with an abrupt organizational change. This request that KMPA should be restructured to reinforce its roles and missions such as marine resource management, maritime accident investigation, maritime pollution prevention, maritime traffic safety management, port security, control of illegal fishery, and so forth in the future.
KMPA, an independent Agency under the MOMAF(Ministry of the Maritime Affairs & Fisheries), has been re-established in August 1996, however, it lacks some core system elements which are essential to an ideal Agency system. As the general concept of KMPA's functions has not yet clearly defined, the criticism on its functions and organizational identity is being steadily proposed by many oceanic scholars. Their sharp criticism caused a big confusion among members of KMPA on their traditional roles and missions and also demoralized them.
To make this possible, the author suggested two analyzing tools. The one was focused on the analysis of functional structure of the administrative organization. To analyze the current administrational structure including 'the theory of departmentalization' were introduced.
The other was on the analysis of the administrative demands KMPA would have in the future. Many factors such as environmental changes affecting KMPA both externally and internally, the government performance results, the statistical forecast of KMPA's administrative demands, and research surveys were included.
By combining above analyses, the organizational feature of the future KMPA may be restructured. Therefore, the organizational model of KMPA including the official status of members, the coordination of the overlapped functions among many agencies and the organization supplementation would be the core elements of this paper.
In spite of its organizational importance, KMPA has experienced many organizational changes as part of governmental restructuring of Korea, which has raised many controversial issues over the roles and mission of it, including the change of official status of its members. According to function analysis, KMPA is not so much a maritime administrative agency as a police agency. Therefore, the discussion of minor issues such as changing official status of members and its affiliation are beyond this research as long as its main roles are not changed noticeably.
Some functions of KMPA which are regarded as excessive redundancy at the national level would be transferred to other agencies of higher performance and customer's satisfaction than KMPA. Surveys showed that KMPA has been one of the top governmental agencies in customer's satisfaction since 1998. This means that the law enforcement activities of police type agency can be compatible with customers-orientated administrative services.
Viewed in terms of organizational culture, police type is generally accepted one among members of KMPA and can be a resource of their morale which may be a vital element in determining the organizational model. Therefore, it is desirable for KMPA to maintain its traditional governmental status as a police agency.
In order to realize above model, the related rules and regulations-for example 'the Law of Maritime Police Agency'-should be revised and enacted. A new Maritime Police Commission under the Prime Minister abreast with National Police Commission should be established. Or two commissions can be integrated into a single one-for example Security Commission-, enabling it to carry out a nation-wide security management both on land and at sea. Thus KMPA, maintaining operational relationship through the above newly-established commission, can enforce the degree of efficiency and customer's satisfaction in its field.
It is necessary for KMPA to restructure its organizational system in order to cope with future administrative demands. This inevitable task would be accomplished by identifying and realigning its basic roles, securing its organizational model, and so forth. Furthermore, provincial MPAs should be established as soon as possible and a new department responsible for restructuring also included.
As most studies on government organization have remained at the abstractive or comprehensive level, it was very difficult to make the basis of practical and systematical research. However, when the concrete and individual case studies are accumulated, it is expected that many accurate and realistic papers on government organization would be published in the future.
There were a few limitations in completing this paper. Firstly, the recent government trend focusing on performance and customer oriented organization was not much included. Considering the current research level on government structure, this paper gave relative importance on functional element of organizational system. Secondly, an extensive examination was unavailable due to the shortage of accurate and reliable research resources. Most data and materials which were not testified were from KMPA except a few from external resources. Thirdly, many social, economic and political variables affecting the entire organizational system were excluded.