• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.358-372
• /
• 2020

Recently, there has been growing social interest in the use of care farms as part of therapy for neurological or mental patients and regional innovation for rural areas. Care farm, which combines the health treatment and rural innovation perspectives, is important to establish a proper governance system for mutual collaboration with various stakeholders. However, there is still a lack of research on this. Therefore, this study designed the care farm governance framework and comparatively analyzed the governance between Netherlands paradise care farm and Belgium blue farm, which are major successful care farm cases. The results showed different governance system between Netherlands and Belgium care farm in terms of institutional and financial support, regional characteristics, structure, operation, and strategy. In Netherlands, as the central government-initiated therapy-centric, care farm governance is concentrated in treatment of patient mainly supported by Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports under the law on social support. Whereas, in Belgium, as local government-initiated agriculture-centric, care farm governance is mainly focused to lead voluntary participation of agricultural cooperatives and medical institutions in regional area. This study provides a theoretical foundation of governance type and system for the care farm research and suggests guidelines of care farm governance for the governments like South Korea consider activating care farm.