The purpose of this thesis is to identify important dimensions to diagnose the current Daejeon Metropolitan City's Citizen Participatory Budgeting(CPB) based on a theoretical model called CLEAR. In addition, it is to evaluate the current level or char...
The purpose of this thesis is to identify important dimensions to diagnose the current Daejeon Metropolitan City's Citizen Participatory Budgeting(CPB) based on a theoretical model called CLEAR. In addition, it is to evaluate the current level or characteristics of each dimension. For that purpose, first of all, it reviews the existing literature and summarizes theoretical background and institutional cases. Especially in terms of latter, it selects outstanding foreign and domestic cases, analyses their characteristics and derive implication to improve the Daejeon case.
For an empirical study, it carries out a questionnaire survey to citizen committee members of CPB, general public servants, and officials in NGOs at Daejeon Metropolitan City. The survey question is classified into three categories: general background question, CLEAR model-related questions, and general evaluative questions. The CLEAR model provides five dimensions to diagnose a participatory institution: 'Can do', 'Like to', 'Enabled to', 'Asked to', and 'Responded to'. Statistical analyses such as factor analysis and ANOVA are carried out with final 224 data which are collected from 52 citizen committee members, 97 public servants, and 74 NGO officials.
The result shows that the empirical data confirms 5 dimensions provided by CLEAR model. More specifically, the factor analysis identifies 7 factors from the data: administrative support, participatory organizing, participatory representativeness and relevance, participatory responsiveness, participant capacity, participatory scale, and strengthening organizing participation. It can be interpreted that participant capacity is related to 'Can do', participatory representativeness and relevance or participatory scale to 'Like to', participatory organizing or strengthening organizing participation to 'Enabled to', administrative support to 'Asked to', and participatory responsiveness to 'Responded to'.
The result also shows there is big perceptive difference on CLEAR related and general evaluative dimensions. The citizen committee members tends to show relatively balanced view on those dimensions. The public servant group evaluates much more favorably to the current institution, while the NGO officials show the opposite tendency.
From a point of view of citizen committed members, it appears that participatory organizing and responsiveness is the most urgent agenda. In addition, the review of specific questions prior to categorizing identifies the importance of citizen committee member representativeness, public servants' more positive interest in participatory budgeting, institutionalization of small scale CPB, sufficient information provision, and activation of CPB Study Group.
Based on empirical results, it provides several suggestions. First of all, it is necessary to strengthen the ordinance and operational rules to change the current passive model to more positive governance model. Secondly, the current CPB structure should be divided into two tiers including local participatory budgeting committee under the current city-level citizen committee. In addition, a special committee can be introduced to represent the minority interest. Thirdly, there should be more effort to change the attitude and perception of public servants. Forth, it is necessary to support network building among citizen committee members and empower and strengthening their leadership. Fifth, a more organized educational system should be introduced to cultivate and improve participating citizens' expertise. Sixth, it is necessary to define more clearly participating citizen members' range of participation and authority, and make it sure to feedback to citizen participants in order for them identify their contribution through participation.