The Korea Local Administration Review

This article aims to studies the type and the structural change of inter-organizational network governance in Namyangju city’s social service delivery system with perspective of a ‘network evolution theory.’ Under the circumstance that community-centered case management is increasingly important, this study conducts network analysis with survey data of 37 public and private social service related organizations between 2012 and 2017. The finding shows that Namyangju social service network belongs to ‘lead organization-governed network’ model with the Hope Care Center in every aspects including information sharing, material support and client referrals. Also, the results reveal that this structure had been reinforced and developed from 2012 to 2017 with higher centrality of the Hope Care Center and centralization. These pieces of evidence suggested that the Hope Care Center functions as a leading organization of both provider and broker for public-private organizational partnership in the network governance, and showed necessity of refined managerial policy for the network governance in order to prevent the possible conflicts among organizations with resource allocation.