12/13/2010

24th Joint International Seminar on Local Autonomy

In late November the Center for Local Autonomy of Hanyang University and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s office in Seoul held their 24th joint International Seminar on Local Autonomy. This year’s seminar focused on “Local Governance and Community”.

After the opening session, that included a strong plea of Dr. Chung Se-Wook to strengthen local governance and community in order to foster decentralization and democracy, 14 experts and scholars of the field discussed democracy’s structure, performance profiles and challenges as well as the role of political actors in a free society. Among the international orators were Prof. Aurel Croissant of the University of Heidelberg, who presented his “concept of embedded democracy”, and Wilfried Kruse, deputy mayor of economic development and head of the department for internal organization of the city of Düsseldorf.

The experts agreed that local governance “keeps decision-making closer to the citizen, giving the citizen more opportunities to give positive or negative feedback to political decision-makers” as Casey Lartigue, an associate fellow at the Center for Free Enterprise, put it into words. He continued:  local autonomy “needs to be focused on empowering citizens to allow them to make decisions themselves. Local governance should be considered a success when citizens have more self-ownership and self-governance.”

In regards to the current situation in the still very centralized Korea the scholars criticized the process of the nomination of local candidates, the omnipresent upside-down approach, the lack of checks and balances and the fact that local decision-makers can hardly be held accountable since they still receive most of their financial resources out of the state budget.

For more information please check out the proceedings by following this link.