earticle

영어

The study aims to explore governance structures of local government committees using the face to face communication relations among committee members. The government committee is known as a horizontal, network governance mode, which plays a complementary role to vertical or hierarchy governance. Thus, mix of the two modes of governance can be seen as a metagovernance. Based on this theoretical concept, this study collected data of Incheon Metropolitan City government committees from 2013 to 2015. Applying social network analysis, this study analyzed the inter-government committee networks by three years, which enables us to compare governance structures between conservative mayor era(2015) and progressive mayor era(2013). As expected, the inter-committees governance structure turned out to be metagovernance. Although public officers and mayors played a policy broker role in the inter-committee network, committee members from the various backgrounds such as civil society, university, and business also played a policy broker role between committees (members). However, during the progressive mayor year, the public officer was one third of all policy brokers, whereas more than half of policy brokers were the public officers under the conservative mayor era. A lesson drawn from the analysis is that establishing a metagovernance mode for iner-committee network depends on how to balance the policy broker roles between public officers and other policy stakeholders rather than simply providing a chance for stakeholders to participate in a government committee.