The Korea Local Administration Review

Concerns about local extinction are being increased due to population decline caused by low birth rates and aging, coupled with the excessive concentration of population and resources in the Seoul metropolitan area. Since the 1990s, Korea has implemented a variety of measures to prevent the concentration in the Capital region and promote balanced regional development. However, regional disparities have further widened with the acceleration of technological changes and digital transformation since the mid-2010s, leading to the perception that the absence of equal opportunities and justice could cause local crisis to escalate into national crisis.
This study aims to address the severe crisis faced by local regions and, furthermore, mitigate the national crisis including the expansion of creative innovation foundation as well as the build-up of industrial ecosystem by exploring a new approach to balanced regional developmen based on various discussions on decentralization and balanced development. After establishing the inter complementary relationships between decentralization and balance, this study proposes a bottom-up, integrated implementation strategy from this perspective. The vertical imbalance of power and the horizontal economic imbalance inherited from the past have become significant obstacles to pursuing regional development, making decentralization and balanced development not a matter of choice but a matter of compromise premised on close interactions.
This study insists that, through the virtuous cycle of decentralization and balance, creative innovation in the regions can be pursed to establish a foundation for autonomous development and to develop regional characteristics and potentials. An integrated balanced development policy leading to the realization of balanced development and spatial justice is addressed as a new paradigm again, and the build-up of decentralized national governance system is also proposed as its key implementation strategty.