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Achieving Community Well-Being Through Community Participatory Governance: The Case of Saemaul Undong

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Handbook of Community Well-Being Research

Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life ((IHQL))

Abstract

Community well-being can be a more inclusive and comprehensive goal than economic growth or social progress. However, studies of community well-being and its related concepts, such as happiness, quality of life, sustainability, and well-being have failed to go beyond measurement and influencing factors. In order for community well-being to be useful for policy, an inquiry of appropriate governance structures for community well-being is essential. In this chapter, we explore community participatory governance – a governance structure that involves both citizens and the government with genuine participation at the community level – as a potential answer. For this purpose, we use the case of Saemaul Undong, a successful community movement that began in 1970 in South Korea. In particular, we focus on the early stages of the movement in the 1970s when community self-help and state support co-existed. This balance of community self-help and state support is not a theoretically novel idea but is difficult to find in practice. We illustrate how an effective division of labor and power in the form of production and provision was key to this balance.

This movement has also been translated as New Community Movement, New Village Movement, or Saemaul Movement. We use the original name Saemaul Undong throughout the chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our use of the word private-public cooperation refers to a citizens-government cooperation, rather than the business-government cooperation implied in private public partnerships (PPP).

  2. 2.

    Some scholars further divide the first stage of SU in the 1970s into the following three stages: (1) Saemaul Cultivation in 1970-1971, (2) Urbanization focusing on rural-income growth, urban-psychological development that began in 1974, (3) village level projects and cooperation among villages that began in 1975. However, the basic governance model of 1970s applies to all of these sub-stages. Therefore, we focus on the entire first stage of SU.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2016S1A3A2924563 and NRF-2015S1A5B1010910).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Seung Jong Lee

  2. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Yunji Kim

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  1. Seung Jong Lee
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Correspondence to Seung Jong Lee .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Honors College and Agricultural Economics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    Rhonda Phillips

  2. School of Environment, Education and Development, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Cecilia Wong

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Lee, S.J., Kim, Y. (2017). Achieving Community Well-Being Through Community Participatory Governance: The Case of Saemaul Undong. In: Phillips, R., Wong, C. (eds) Handbook of Community Well-Being Research. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0878-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0878-2_7

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