A Study of Dynamic Characteristics in the Process of Community Building Projects in Korea

주민주도적 마을만들기의 동태적 측면에 관한 연구

Recently, Community Rebuilding Projects (hereinafter CRPs) in Korea have been driven and motivated by community inhabitants by themselves, and highlighted as an alternative approach to overcome the limitation revealed normally in top-down projects of community vitalization by the Government. The CRPs encourage community-lead development because it happens to integrate multiple stakeholders and to help inhabitants to participate in the process of the CRPs by accumulating and enlarging social capital and network among inhabitants, and the social gain consequently raises the efficiency of public investment in revitalizing communities. In this study, the series of Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) is to be elaborated and the System-Thinking (ST) approach is to be presented to understand the dynamic characteristics residing in the above development process of rebuilding communities. The ST approach refers to the CLDs analyzing 19 remarkable Korean CRP cases, and leads to a conclusion including some of policy instruments to support the bottom-up CRPs in Korea. This study contributes a theoretical framework to understand the dynamic relation between social capital and community revitalization as well as empirical suggestions to respond to the issues of the CRPs in Korean local governments.