Collaborative governance difficulty and policy implication: Case study of the Sewol disaster in South Korea

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of the disaster involving the South Korean ferry, Sewol; offer policy implications; and point to the difficulty of collaboration in the functioning of the national disaster management system. Design/methodology/approach – The government network approach of this paper is adopted in order to study how to link different policy actors, how to deal with disaster issues in their networking, and how to produce social-political resilience. This paper explores why the national incident management system was not working properly in terms of “governance networking”, and focuses on changes that have been made to the legal system and the government organizational system since 2000. Findings – The principle results of the analysis are as follows: first, the collaboration between organizations that existed at the time of the accident focused only on sharing resources, and service delivery involved little connection between organizations. Second, assessment of the scale of the disaster was not carried out correctly because of dysfunctional relations between government network organizations and disaster victims, which affected both sides’ awareness of policy issues and priorities. Originality/value – This paper found that an integrated disaster management framework was not available, and activities were carried out for the sake of form. Also, no governance network for collaboration had been systematically built up, and there was also little collaboration between public and private organizations.