Comparative Study on the Collaborative Governance Type for the Metropolitan Economic Regions in case of Korea and Japan

In Korea, the new regional development policies on decentralization, regional cooperation and competition have been established and exerted since the 2000s. Especially, in the field of regional development, as a main control tower, the Korean Presidential Committee on Regional Development (PCRD) has been promoting three spatial regional policies (Daily Happy Living Community in incumbent Park’s Administration and Daily Living Sphere, Economic Region, and Supra-economic Region in previous Lee’s Administration) to address conflictual urban issues and, at the same time, to maximize regional growth potential in metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, in Japan, these issues are seemingly being conducted by the strongly institutionalized governance systems at the metropolitan and regional level, quite different from Korea’s state-steering regional governance system. As a result, we can draw some conclusions that the cooperative governance structures of Korea and Japan depend obviously on the peculiar politico-social and economic conditions and problems in the metropolitan areas concerned where the collaborative governance and leadership can take divers variations on a continuum from weakly to strongly institutionalized solutions. From the analysis, finally, we can picture some different governance solutions according to different metropolitan and regional policies between Japan and Korea cases.