Eun-Hee Lee1, Yeo-Chang Youn 2
1Department of Forest Sciences2Seoul National University

Korean village groves are the heritage sites of forest culture, which contain the history and culture of their ancestors for thousands of years. They are the common resources as they have been directly related to the life of the villagers and protected by them. However, the villagers’ interest and willingness to succeed the traditional culture gradually decrease as time goes by. Changes in tenure rights occurred as development pressure increased. As a result, a lot of village groves were converted into something else and there is no management organization for them. How to manage the commons such as village groves can be divided into four theoretical methods. 1) establishing a private property system 2) mobilizing the government to use deductibles and penalties 3) a municipal system established by communities based on communication and trust and 4) co-management regimes. The co-management regimes are widely used to manage the commons. Then, which management system is effective in order to preserve the village groves? So far, there has been no study on the management organizations of Korean village groves which is conducted through empirical and theoretical analysis. The goals of the research are to clarify who are the main stakeholders in today’s village grove management in Korea and to exhibit how each stakeholder’s concrete roles are interacted. Also, through this study the environmental factors for cooperation between stakeholders were determined. A total of 34 village groves in Namwon City were studied so as to understand which stakeholders participate in the management of the village groves directly or indirectly by means of a questionnaire and field survey. The village groves were divided into two groups, namely single and multiple. The ‘single’ group signifies the case in which only owner participates in the management of village grove. The ‘multiple’ group signifies the case in which other stakeholders as well as the owner participates in the management of the village grove. The village groves were regrouped to three cases: private, state or village depending on the ownership. A total of six village groves were analyzed through social network analysis (SNA) for the management status and the degree of cooperation between stakeholders for each village grove. The result shows that the ‘multiple’ groups have a higher level of cooperation and management status than the ‘single’ group. In conclusion, a co-management regime seems to be effective where various participants take part in order to manage village groves properly. This is the first study that deals with management organizations of village groves. It is therefore expected that the research will provide basis for their effective management in the future.