The Korea Local Administration Review

The Pilot Project (PP) of the Residents’ Autonomous Councils (RACs) is evaluated and discussed in this paper. To improve the problems of and to raise the quality of the existing Residents’ Committees (RCs), which was fostered as self-governing organizations of residents in 1999 with the implementation of local autonomy, the past government has promoted the PP since 2013, and the new government in 2022 is required to re-establish the policy direction. As a reference for this, the author(s) analyzed the current status data of 274 RCs and RACs submitted to the Best Practice Contest in the 2021 National RCs & RACs Fair, established a series of hypotheses on the outcome of the PP, and analyzed the differences between the two groups through statistical tests.
From the analyses, the author(s) found that significant changes have been made in RACs, by strengthening public authority from the existing RCs, in terms of the composition, operation, projects and activities, and financing methods of the organizations. It is confirmed that the PP so far has produced meaningful outcome in enhancing the effectiveness of the policy. Considering that the policy so far has adopted the strategy of strengthening publicity to drive the autonomous capabilities of the organizations, the new government, as the national stance focuses on strengthening capabilities in private, seems to take the future policy direction will be a strategy for securing publicity through first strengthening autonomous capabilities.