This study is designed to establish a relationship between council and executive branch of the local government which are actual agencies for embodying policies of the local government. In particular, by grouping conflicts between the two agencies int...
This study is designed to establish a relationship between council and executive branch of the local government which are actual agencies for embodying policies of the local government. In particular, by grouping conflicts between the two agencies into types, the author seeks to find a constructive relationship between them in running the local government at this point in time. Based on those points, this study classifies the traditional levels of conflicts between local government and council into those of structure, organization and personality. To begin with, the conflicts of the power-separation type are at the level of structure. They belong to conflicts that come from power separation since the Korean local administrative organizations have a strong mayor-council structure. In addition, seen from the viewpoint of an efficient execution of local government administration, conflicts are bound to take place because of the collision of different values of council and local government agency in their perception of respective roles and goals. Therefore, this study classifies these internal conflicts surrounding the goals of the local government administration into 'value-clash conflicts'. The power separation conflicts and value-clash conflicts are somewhat similar in their environment and organization. But, the power-separation conflicts are derived from different establishment goals, establishment backgrounds, legal bases and other traits inherent in the local government. Basically, they come from the structural incompatibility between the two power agencies. The value-clash conflicts, on the other hand, arise while special issues and incidents come into being in a dynamic process. They represent a wide variety of interests and compatible goals. Finally, the conflicts at the level of members of each organization are 'awareness lacking conflicts’ that arise among individuals who materialize the goals of each institution. In this study, prior theories and cases are analyzed in depth and intermittent and sporadic classifications in the past are systematically organized. On the basis of those efforts, causes of different conflict types and their resolution ideas are presented. In particular, with respect to conflict resolutions and their strategies, general discussions are made and major conflicts involving budgets, ordinances, resident welfare are analyzed to shed light on what the traditional theories have been saying. Furthermore, efforts are made to see what implications the analysis offers for the Korean local autonomy. The typology has the following limitations: First, any interpretation of conflict resolution strategies requires precaution. That is to say, presenting some resolution strategies to each conflict type may mean that they are the only ways to solve the conflicts, but it should be borne in mind that these ideas are only pointing to the fundamental principles and directions. Since conflicts in each case are different in action-takers, interested parties, ripple effects and their origins, it is almost impossible to offer a comprehensive and far-reaching alternative to any conflict. Second, some cases used in this study may not belong to just one conflict type. But, since conflicts are classified in consideration of conflict contexts, time factors, action-takers, conflict types and other support data, some amount of intuition and judgment on the part of the author is unavoidable, which is also a limitation to this study.