Translating youth participation into policy: a case study of the Seoul Youth Ordinance in South Korea

This study examines how youth policy in South Korea became institutionalized, using the 2015 enactment of the Seoul Youth Ordinance as a case study. Using Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach, it compares central-government approaches with local-level policy innovation. Although youth-related issues expanded beyond unemployment, national policies remained narrowly focused on employment and failed to achieve coupling among the problem, political, and policy streams. In contrast, Seoul’s welfare-centred political environment, reshaped by the 2011 mayoral by-election, activated the political stream and created more favourable conditions for stream alignment. Youth organizations formulated and refined concrete policy proposals, while the mayoral administration provided political sponsorship and institutional brokerage that connected those proposals to formal decision-making processes and facilitated the coupling of the three streams after the policy window opened. The resulting ordinance marked a paradigmatic shift by institutionalizing youth as multidimensional policy subjects and establishing participatory governance mechanisms. By comparing central and local policymaking within the same national context, this study contributes to MSA scholarship by showing how institutional conditions shape stream alignment and coupling, thereby affecting whether youth participation is translated into policy institutionalization.