준지방자치단체의 개념과 적용가능성 연구

초록

Few attentions have been paid to quasi-local government, though most students of local administration stress the necessity of that system for grass-root democracy. Moreover, the National Assembly overtly considers the introduction of quasi-local government as part of the nationwide local system reorganizations. This paper aims to define the concept of quasi-local government and examine its applicability to Korea. Quasi-local government can be defined as a kind of semi-autonomous local agency, which has a level of self-governing authority over public affairs within their area, but no legal personality due to non-existence of local council. According to this definition, quasi-local government includes a wide variety of autonomous local agency between non-autonomous local administrative agency and full-autonomous local government. In this respect, quasi-local government can be considered as complementary devices rather than alternatives to local government in relation to local system reorganization. Thus, small communities like town, village can be reorganized into quasi-local government, more importantly, previous administrative agencies and new self-governing council must be closely linked for enlarging the citizen's direct participation. And autonomous districts of metropolitan cities should not be restructured into quasi-local government since replacing of previous local government can lead to a sharp drop of local autonomy.

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