Exploring institutional reform of Korean civil service pension: advocacy coalition framework, policy knowledge and social innovation

Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, Apr 2018

This paper examines what factors are associated with the 2015 pension reform of Korean civil servant as social innovation. We explore what lessons we can learn from the pension reform in terms of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) model. The ACF model allows us to identify how the substantial reform is, relying on policy knowledge and entrepreneurs, possible in terms of political and social consensus. It also clearly demonstrates the possibility of systematic pension reform at an appropriate level through social learning and policy learning. Through the ACF model, we review how South Korea’s civil servant pension reform act occurred at the end of May 2015. The temporal scope covers from 2009 latest reform, and the 2014’s President administrative policy speech that had strongly been showed her will to reform the pension issue to the end of May 2015 when the reform bill enacted. We investigate each advocacy coalition in order to elucidate the actors that constitute the two coalition groups and to scrutinize whether a policy broker had existed in the process. We also attempt to find the relatively stable parameters and external events that affected the reform and also the belief system that shared by two advocacy coalition group. The result clearly shows that the two coalition groups shared their normative beliefs ultimately, for example, the need to change the current civil servant’s pension system, but, the gap in the numerical change in the policy core belief and secondary belief between the two actors had seemed to be excessively large and uncompromising. A policy broker who can coordinate the interests and interests of stakeholder groups over the government pension reform proposal was desperately needed. Negotiation and leadership of the policy entrepreneurs led to a settlement of the government pension reform proposal at the end of May 2015. Their entrepreneurial activities led to an appropriate level of social consensus on the sustainable reform of pension system through policy knowledge and learning. Further research is required to explore how models of socially innovative forms of governance are created in various pension reforms across various countries. It is also required to examine how policy entrepreneurs use policy knowledge and information for a successful institutional reform through social innovation across various countries.

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Exploring institutional reform of Korean civil service pension: advocacy coalition framework, policy knowledge and social innovation

Lee and Jung Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity Exploring institutional reform of Korean civil service pension: advocacy coalition framework, policy knowledge and social innovation Keunyoung Lee - This paper examines what factors are associated with the 2015 pension reform of Korean civil servant as social innovation. We explore what lessons we can learn from the pension reform in terms of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) model. The ACF model allows us to identify how the substantial reform is, relying on policy knowledge and entrepreneurs, possible in terms of political and social consensus. It also clearly demonstrates the possibility of systematic pension reform at an appropriate level through social learning and policy learning. Through the ACF model, we review how South Korea’s civil servant pension reform act occurred at the end of May 2015. The temporal scope covers from 2009 latest reform, and the 2014’s President administrative policy speech that had strongly been showed her will to reform the pension issue to the end of May 2015 when the reform bill enacted. We investigate each advocacy coalition in order to elucidate the actors that constitute the two coalition groups and to scrutinize whether a policy broker had existed in the process. We also attempt to find the relatively stable parameters and external events that affected the reform and also the belief system that shared by two advocacy coalition group. The result clearly shows that the two coalition groups shared their normative beliefs ultimately, for example, the need to change the current civil servant’s pension system, but, the gap in the numerical change in the policy core belief and secondary belief between the two actors had seemed to be excessively large and uncompromising. A policy broker who can coordinate the interests and interests of stakeholder groups over the government pension reform proposal was desperately needed. Negotiation and leadership of the policy entrepreneurs led to a settlement of the government pension reform proposal at the end of May 2015. Their entrepreneurial activities led to an appropriate level of social consensus on the sustainable reform of pension system through policy knowledge and learning. Further research is required to explore how models of socially innovative forms of governance are created in various pension reforms across various countries. It is also required to examine how policy entrepreneurs use policy knowledge and information for a successful institutional reform through social innovation across various countries. © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Introduction Knowledge and information are crucial to inducing a grand social consensus on how to define complicated common issues and on how to design reforms to solve them. Knowledge provides policy direction and idea about how to identify and unravel various common issues we face. Social and institutional innovation for global problems and public policy concerns involves heterogeneous interests and competing solutions. It is not easy to find a unified agreeable solution from various political stakeholders, especially not only because of lack of information and knowledge about the resolution but also because of lack of experience to solve them. For instance, it is difficult to design and implement optimal institutional reforms for the public pension, health insurance, and environmental pollutions with social externalities and market failure because of lack of social knowledge about the solution to the reform idea and process as well as a strong political resistance to those reforms. Various institutional reforms across countries can provide a promising opportunity to learn how social innovation can contribute to reconstructing and harmonizing competing political interests embedded in policy reforms (Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996, 2000; Greener, 2002; Marier, 2009; Martin, 1995; Peck, 2011; Zahariadis & Allen, 1995; Weible, 2007) . For instance, the evolution and reform of public employee pension systems across countries' pension reform usually involve a very complicated political and economic interests. Since the 1990s, most developed countries have experienced increasing political and social pressures on the need to reform public pensions due to aging and government fiscal deficits. The Korean government has also received increasing political and social pressures on public pension reforms. The past major reforms of civil servant pension in South Korea took place at 1995, 2000, 2009 and 2015. Compared the three previous pe (...truncated)


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Keunyoung Lee, Kwangho Jung. Exploring institutional reform of Korean civil service pension: advocacy coalition framework, policy knowledge and social innovation, Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 2018, pp. 14, Volume 4, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s40852-018-0089-0