[2026 Parliamentary Audit] Jo Gyewon: "Culture and Tourism Must Shift to Addressing Regional Decline by Giving People a Reason to Stay"

Presents 10 policy priorities, including "15-minute cultural service areas"

Jo Gyewon, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party of Korea, said on October 7 that cultural and tourism policies should shift away from focusing on providing facilities and attracting tourists and instead prioritize improving living conditions for residents, longer stays, and repeat visits to address regional decline.

Jo Gyewon, Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker.

On October 13, as the National Assembly's Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee held its parliamentary audit, Jo published a policy report titled "Proposals for Cultural and Tourism-Based Settlement Innovation to Address Regional Decline" and outlined 10 policy priorities.

The report identifies regional decline not simply as a decrease in population but as a structural problem involving the erosion of community functions and everyday services such as transportation, healthcare, education, and culture. Its premise is that culture should give residents a reason to continue living in their communities, while tourism should encourage visitors to return and maintain ties with those communities.

The key proposals include establishing 15-minute cultural catchment areas; helping local cultural and tourism professionals settle in their communities; creating resident-led local cultural ecosystems; promoting longer-stay tourism and expanding the population with ties to local areas; turning national heritage into an asset for local settlement; supporting young people and artists in settling locally; reforming budget structures to build local capacity; introducing cultural and tourism settlement innovation agreements; evaluating outcomes based on the living population; and strengthening local governance.

Jo stressed that residents' ability to actually use cultural facilities matters more than the scale of facility provision. She said a "15-minute cultural catchment area" indicator should be introduced to assess residents' access to culture, taking into account travel time to facilities, transportation conditions, and operating hours.

She also argued that tourism policy should be evaluated based on criteria such as length of stay, number of overnight stays, repeat-visit rates, and usage rates of local businesses, rather than visitor numbers. She proposed that programs to train local professionals be evaluated based on the proportion of trainees who remain in the region one and three years after training, rather than the number of people trained.

She also proposed launching a pilot "Cultural and Tourism Settlement Innovation Agreement" program starting in 2027, under which the central and local governments would coordinate projects tailored to local characteristics in areas with declining populations over a period of three to five years.

"Culture and tourism alone cannot solve regional decline, but they can be important policy tools for improving residents' quality of life and building up people, jobs, and community capacity in local areas," Jo said.

She added, "We need to shift from policies that bring people in to policies that give them reasons to stay," and called on the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to report within 30 days after the parliamentary audit on the feasibility and timelines for key measures, including improving access to cultural catchment areas, evaluating tourism based on longer stays and repeat visits, tracking the retention of local professionals, and introducing settlement innovation agreements.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.