A five-year national project to build a Korea-specific rural regeneration model — one that treats the decline of rural communities as a threat to the country's long-term sustainability — is now underway. Rather than pouring money into facilities and subsidies, the initiative aims to capture the lessons of successful rural communities as structured data and turn them into a replicable regeneration model for other regions.

The Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI) announced Monday that it is conducting a medium- to long-term research program to develop a Korean-style rural regeneration model running from 2023 to 2027, as detailed in its report on field-centered rural regeneration model development — the third of five annual phases. This year marks the third year of the five-year study, in which theoretical models developed in earlier phases are being applied to actual rural communities for real-world validation.

The report diagnoses the persistent population decline and aging of rural areas not as problems confined to the countryside but as structural threats to national sustainability. Rural communities underpin food security, ecosystem conservation and balanced national development — far beyond mere food production — and if they collapse, cities will not be able to sustain themselves either, the researchers argue.

The research team noted that existing rural regeneration policy has leaned heavily on facility investment and subsidy disbursement. Without building sufficient resident capacity and community organizations capable of self-sustaining operations after a project ends, rural areas have grown increasingly dependent on government fiscal support, the report found. Resident participation has also largely been confined to token consultation procedures, falling short of a structure in which local people directly solve their own problems, the researchers said.

In response, the team compiled the success stories of leading rural regeneration communities nationwide into a database and extracted the common principles behind those successes for application across different regions. Rather than copying the specific conditions of one place, the approach identifies what actually worked during successful regeneration processes so that other rural communities can adapt those lessons to their own circumstances.

"The success or failure of rural regeneration depends on how systematically the lessons of earlier successes are learned and transferred to fit the conditions of other regions," said Shim Jae-heon, a research fellow at KREI. "This study focused on structuring scattered field experiences into data, verifying the lessons drawn from them in actual villages, and creating a path that other regions can follow."

Shim added that since the achievements of leading communities are mostly the result of more than a decade of nurturing people and organizations, building the foundation of resident capacity and cooperation must come before turning to facilities and budgets.

Photo is unrelated to the article. [Getty Images Bank]
Photo is unrelated to the article. [Getty Images Bank]

The research findings also confirmed the importance of first establishing a social foundation — resident organizations and local trust and cooperation. Analysis of leading cases revealed a growth path in which social capital is built through organizations and governance, followed by the strengthening of resident capacity and cultural capital, which then leads to gains in local assets such as space and landscape, and ultimately to financial results. On that basis, the researchers concluded that building a "software" foundation — developing resident organizations and capabilities — must come before investing in physical facilities.

In this year's third-phase research, the model was applied in practice to Namyang-myeon in Cheongyang-gun, South Chungcheong Province, and Juam-myeon in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province. In Namyang-myeon, a resident organization was established to drive an integrated care project, while in Juam-myeon, an organization was set up to carry out local regeneration work. Through these pilots, the researchers said they confirmed that the resident-led rural regeneration model is effective in strengthening community capacity and creating a foundation for self-sustaining development.

The research continues through next year. In the fourth year, the model will be refined to incorporate field validation results, and in the final fifth year, the team plans to develop strategies for nationwide rollout and institutionalization. The researchers also proposed linking the rural regeneration model to existing policies such as rural spatial planning and rural compacts, and over the longer term, developing a cross-ministry rural regeneration support system that connects bottom-up resident planning with government-funded programs.


adastra@heraldcorp.com