농촌지역개발 활성화를 위한 사회적기업의 발전방향과 과제

Abstract

본 연구에서는 사회적 경제를 구축하려는 지역의 자발적 노력을 촉진하고 농촌지역개발에 기여하는 농촌 사회적기업을 육성하기 위해 필요한 노력으로 다음과 같은 정책과제를 제시하였다.

첫째, 지역 주도의 사회적 경제 주체를 적극 발굴하여 육성해야 한다. 둘째, 기존 인증제도를 개선하여 농촌 현실에 적합한 사회적 목적을 추구하는 농촌형 사회적기업을 육성해야 한다. 셋째, 사회적기업의 기존 활동영역 외에도 로컬푸드, 환경·산림·경관 보전, 도농 교류 등 향후 농촌 사회적기업의 활동영역을 확대하고 이들 분야에서 사업모델을 발굴·보급해야 한다. 넷째, 효율성보다는 효과성을 중시하는 보호된 시장을 보장해야 한다. 다섯째, 업종에 따른 차별화된 사회적기업 지원이 이루어져야 한다.

Recently, developing social enterprises is considered as the third way to vitalize depressed rural areas instead of government policy and market mechanism. But we have just a few ideas of the actual condition and the potential roles of rural social enterprises. It is the very purpose of this study to analyze their condition and roles in rural development, and suggest policy strategies to foster rural social enterprises. We carried out a survey targeting rural social enterprises to review their real condition, and analyzed their roles in endogenous rural development based on the survey results. We also performed in-depth case studies of Hoengseong-gun(Gangwon-do) and Jinan-gun (Jeollabuk-do) to look into the realities of social economies of rural areas and the roles of individual social enterprises in rural vitalization. With the results of the survey and case studies, we found out that rural social enterprises are very conducive to endogenous rural development by local embeddedness of their input-output linkages, socio-economic networks, labor input, etc. Yet, some problems to be solved are also discovered. For instance, rural social enterprises lack outward linkages for accessing to more specialized resources such as finance, information, experts, and so forth. As a result of this study, we suggested some policy strategies to foster rural social enterprises as follows. Firstly, a variety of agents acting in rural social economies should be discovered and fostered as social enterprises. Secondly, the existing government certification system of social enterprises should be amended so that various voluntary and organizational efforts to improve difficult situations of rural areas can be appreciated as social enterprises. Thirdly, business models for social enterprises suited to rural areas should be developed and disseminated. Fourthly, rural social enterprises should be offered protected markets in terms of not efficiency but effectiveness on rural vitalization and job creation. Lastly, government supports should be offered to rural social enterprises on the basis of differences of their business fields.

Researchers: Kwang-Sun Kim, In-Hey Kwon and Chang-Ho Kim Research Period: 2010.1~2010.10 E-mail Address: yeskskim@krei.re.kr