1. The second meeting of the public diplomacy committee, which was inaugurated in August 2017 pursuant to the public diplomacy act in force since August 2016, will take place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on November 26, chaired by Minister of Foreign Affairs Kang Kyung-wha.

° The public diplomacy committee, a pan-governmental body in charge of integrating and fine-tuning public diplomacy policies, reviews and fine-tunes main matters pertaining to those policies.

° This joint private-public  committee, comprised of (vice-minister-level) officials of 14 ministries and the Office for Government Policy Coordination, as well as five civilians, is also joined by officials of provincial government agencies as observers.

2. In the forthcoming meeting, the participants will extensively discuss ways to advance public diplomacy: Among the agenda items will be the possibility of using the state-of-the-art information and communications technology (ICT) in implementing "the Republic of Korea's first basic plan on public diplomacy (2017-2021)" in a bid to enhance the ROK’s image; the achievements made in 2018 in public diplomacy and "the (draft) comprehensive plan on public diplomacy for the year 2019"; the plan to convene on a regular basis the working-level committee set up to boost public diplomacy on policy; and ways to step up digital public diplomacy on policy.

3. In particular, in the upcoming meeting, the participants, building on the outcome of the review of the progress in public diplomacy so far, will mainly discuss ways to reduce the current focus on cultural public diplomacy and to boost public diplomacy on policy and on knowledge.

※ "The Republic of Korea’s first basic plan on public diplomacy (2017-2021)" calls for achieving 4 goals and implementing 15 strategies and 49 tasks in order to fulfill the vision of creating “a charming Korea that, together with the people, communicates with the world.”

4. Meetings of the public diplomacy committee are expected to lead government agencies to step up information-sharing and cooperation among them and thereby to increase efficiency and synergistic effect of public diplomacy. Going forward, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will continue implementing public diplomacy in an integrated and systematic way in a bid to fulfill the public diplomacy vision of creating “a charming Korea that, together with the people, communicates with the world.”

* unofficial translation