A consensus on collaborative regional development through communication and harmony spread

PCRD hosted an inaugural meeting of Collaborative Regional Development Forum(CRDF) at Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Seoul on May 10. At this meeting it was declared that the spirit of age related to 21st century’s regional policy is collaborative development, meanwhile it was agreed to spread a consensus on collaborative development based on communication and harmony widely and to prepare prepare policy measures for that object.

CRDF is an opinion seeking expert-led organization set up by PCRD, whose total members are around 100 including 9 co-representatives, 26 sub-committee chairmen and many consultants. The purpose of this organization is to complement PCRD’s function related to seeking on-the-spot opinion on regional policies.

One of CRDF co-representatives, Professor emeritus Park at Chonbuk National University, stated that the core spirit of collaborative development was not a balance through dispersion but mutual prosperity through cooperation, and further paraphrased that collaborative development embracing the on-the-spot voices and the urgent issues such as jobs and quality of life should be achieved instead of simple balanced development such as functional realignment of capital region.

Also he said” What’s concerned with an actual life such as employment, education, medical care, security and transportation is the most important to local residents, therefore in order to focus on these things, it is necessary to make livelihoods of public reflected in local policies, establish local policies based on the on-the-spot opinions and separate local policies from political interests.”

Hong Chul, Chairman of PCRD, made an opening remark that only when local policies are differentiated from politics, the advance of local policies in terms of local residents’ welfare and communication would be possible, and concerning this fact he emphasized that local residents’ mature sense of citizenship is the last resort to guarantee the success of local policies.

Also he pointed out that urgently needed was the new version of local policies to enable capital and local region and urban and rural area to develop together through communication and harmony, and he said that for the purpose of it CRDF would be operated not only as a place for interactive policy communication but also as a place for making consensus by synthesizing a variety of discourses.