Asking in a Way People Understand: Developmental Disability Ordinances Across 15 Korean Regions

When a regional government in South Korea plans support for people with developmental disabilities, should it ask those people directly, in a way they can actually follow? Five of the 15 regional ordinances I compared write that down as a duty.

In my last post I promised to line up the regional ordinances on the rights of people with developmental disabilities in the same way. This post keeps that promise.

Start with the national law. Article 1 of Korea's act on the rights of and support for persons with developmental disabilities says support should respect the person's own wishes as far as possible. Article 8 says they decide for themselves where to live, whether to accept treatment and which welfare services to use. Article 10 requires central and local governments to publish important policy information in a form that people with developmental disabilities can easily understand.

Each of the 15 regional governments whose ordinance texts I retrieved from Korea's official legal information service (law.go.kr) has an ordinance on this subject. I compared one core ordinance per region, 15 in total. Sejong has also passed separate ordinances on preventing people with developmental disabilities from going missing (2024) and on liability insurance for their social activities (2026). Gwangju and Jeonnam are not yet in my collected data, so they are left out.

First, the basic plan. Eleven of the 15 ordinances say the region "shall" draw up a basic plan every five years: Gangwon, Gyeongnam, Gyeongbuk, Daegu, Daejeon, Busan, Seoul, Incheon, Jeju, Chungnam and Chungbuk. Sejong and Ulsan use a four-year cycle and Gyeonggi a three-year one. Jeonbuk instead lists "drawing up individual support plans" among the tasks of its developmental disability support centre (Article 10).

There are caveats next to many of those duties. Gyeongbuk and Ulsan allow the plan to be folded into a wider welfare or community social-security plan. Daejeon treats the duty as met if its five-year disability policy plan already covers the required items, and Incheon may skip a separate plan if its mid- to long-term plan includes it. Sejong builds it into its community social-security plan from the start. Five ordinances, then, leave room to fit the plan inside a bigger one.

The second measure is the heart of this post: when planning, whom do you ask, and how? Seoul's ordinance (Article 6-2) says the city shall gather the views of people with developmental disabilities, their families and guardians, and must give them ample opportunity to speak, using a way of communicating that suits them.

Five regions write both parts - a duty to listen and a suitable way of communicating - into their ordinance: Gyeonggi, Gyeongnam, Daejeon, Seoul and Chungbuk. Chungbuk also allows an advisory body in which people with developmental disabilities and experts take part.

Busan added Article 5-2 in 2024, saying the city "shall" gather the views of people with developmental disabilities, their families and guardians when running its programmes. Chungnam says the province "may" gather the views of residents, including disability organisations, practitioners and experts, when drawing up or changing its basic plan. The gap between "shall" and "may" is the same one I wrote about last time.

In the other eight texts - Gangwon, Gyeongbuk, Daegu, Sejong, Ulsan, Incheon, Jeonbuk and Jeju - the word for "views" or "opinions" does not appear at all. That does not mean those regions never listen; committees or public hearings can do that work. The difference is whether the promise is written into the ordinance itself.

Why does "a suitable way of communicating" matter? For many people with developmental disabilities, long official letters and difficult words are a barrier in themselves. Easy-read text with pictures, or an unhurried face-to-face conversation, is what turns asking into actually hearing. That is also why the national law singles out information that is easy to understand.

A promise written into an ordinance gives residents and local councils grounds to ask: when you drew up this plan, how did you ask the people it is for? Anyone can look up their region's ordinance on law.go.kr under local laws, and searching it for that one word is a good start.

In the next post I will look, in the same way, at the lifelong-learning centres that appear in many of these ordinances - places for adults with developmental disabilities after they leave school.

Sources

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• [A] 충청북도 발달장애인 권리보장 및 지원 조례 — 2025-12-31 공포 · 제6조 · 5년마다 · 제12조 의견을 수렴하여야 · 적합한 의사소통 방식

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