Rep. Cho Gye-won urges shift in culture and tourism policy
Focus to move from facility supply to residential and lifestyle population
Lawmaker presents 10 policy tasks to break cycle of regional depopulation
'Software' policies needed to give people reasons to stay
Calls have emerged for a sweeping overhaul of culture and tourism policy — away from building facilities and toward keeping people in local communities — as a way to halt regional depopulation.
Rep. Cho Gye-won of the Democratic Party of Korea released a policy report titled "Proposals for Residential Innovation Through Culture and Tourism in Response to Regional Depopulation" at the National Assembly's Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee national audit on Tuesday, urging a shift in culture and tourism policy from attracting tourists and building facilities to improving living conditions and expanding the lifestyle population.
The report diagnoses regional depopulation as a structural problem rooted in the weakening of everyday services and community functions, and presents 10 policy tasks to reframe culture and tourism as tools for encouraging people to settle in local areas.
"Regional depopulation is a vicious cycle in which a shrinking population weakens everyday services — transportation, healthcare, education and culture — and that inconvenience drives even more people away," Cho said. "Culture should give residents a reason to keep living in a place, and tourism should be an opportunity for outsiders to return and build ties with the region."
The 10 proposed tasks are: establishing 15-minute cultural living zones, attracting and retaining skilled professionals, building resident-led ecosystems, expanding stay-based tourism and relational population, converting national heritage into residential assets, supporting the settlement of youth and artists, restructuring budget frameworks, introducing culture and tourism residential innovation agreements, adopting lifestyle population performance metrics, and strengthening local governance.
Cho particularly urged the introduction of a "15-minute cultural living zone" indicator that reflects accessibility, transportation and operating hours, saying, "What matters is not how many cultural facilities have been built, but whether residents can in fact use them."
He also said tourism performance should be measured by length of stay, number of overnight visits and return rates rather than visitor numbers, and that workforce development programs should be evaluated not by the number of people trained but by the share who remain in the region after one and three years.
In addition, Cho proposed launching a pilot "culture and tourism residential innovation agreement" starting in 2027, under which central and local governments would coordinate projects in depopulation-designated areas over three to five years.
"Culture and tourism alone cannot solve regional depopulation, but they can be important policy tools for improving residents' quality of life and helping people, jobs and community capacity accumulate in a region," Cho said. "Rather than continually creating new projects, what matters more is changing the goals and evaluation criteria of existing policies."
He said the focus should be on genuinely raising the residential value of local communities rather than chasing numbers.
"Culture and tourism policy must now shift from 'policies that bring people in' to 'policies that give people reasons to stay,'" Cho said, urging the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to report on the implementation schedule and plans for the key tasks within 30 days of the national audit's conclusion.
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