지방자치단체 연계･협력 강화를 위한 지방자치법의 개정과 공법적 평가 - 정부의 특별지방자치단체 도입안을 중심으로 -

Abstract

With the expansion of decentralization and the expansion of wide-area administration in modern local administration, the need for linked cooperation among local governments is growing even more. Through these links and cooperation, it will be possible to prevent conflicts between local governments or to pre-adjust disputes. The current Local Autonomy Act institutionalizes several cooperative methods ― the consignment of affairs under Article 151, the administrative council under Articles 152 to 158, the local government association under Articles 159 to 164, and the establishment of the local government federation under Article 165. ―, declaring the obligations to cooperate among local governments(Article 147). However, it is hard to say that these legal partnerships have been so actively utilized in the field of local autonomy. In response, the government proposed a proposal to introduce a ‘Special local autonomous government’ with the characteristics and functions of a joint wide-area office handling organization in the revised Local Autonomy Act submitted to the National Assembly. It was considered that the proposed introduction of the special local autonomous government should be systematically analyzed and reviewed from a legislative policy perspective in order to provide a more complete legal system, as it would effectively be a stronger method of cooperation in legal status and power compared to existing administrative councils or local government associations. In this paper, the main contents of the government's proposal to introduce a special local autonomous government were first introduced, and similar systems were reviewed in comparison with the local government cooperative system under the current law and with a special local public organization in Japan. Based on this, feasibility or appropriateness at the legal level were analyzed for each key issue of the government's introduction plan, and supplementary opinions were presented. Designing and legislating a special local autonomous government system seems not so simple. First of all, it should be a constitutional idea to prevent controversy over unconstitutionality, ensure convergence with the overall system of local autonomy law, and clarify institutional and functional differentiation from existing legal cooperative methods. In this regard, the government's revision plan could be regarded as reaching a mature stage in general, but in part, it was decided that more supplementation and improvement should be made from the legal system and legal perspectives.