Exporting Urban Korea?

Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience

Se Hoon Park, Hyun Bang Shin, Hyun Soo Kang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000292725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A detailed examination of the "Korean development model" from its urban dimension, evaluating its sociopolitical contexts and implications for international development cooperation.

There is an increasing tendency to use the development experience of Asian countries as a reference point for other countries in the Global South. Korea's condensed urbanization and industrialization, accompanied by the expansion of new cities and industrial complexes across the country, have become one such model, even if the fruits of such development may not have been equitably shared across geographies and generations. The chapters in this book critically reassess the Korean urban development experience from regional policy to new town development, demonstrating how these policy experiences were deeply rooted in Korea's socioeconomic environment and discussing what can be learned from them when applying them in other developmental contexts.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in the field of urban studies and developmental studies in general, and in Korea's (urban) development experience in particular.

Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1Introduction

Reconsidering the Korean urban development experience for international cooperation

Se Hoon Park, Hyun Bang Shin and Hyun Soo Kang

This book builds on the collective efforts of the scholars and researchers who have studied the dynamics of urban development in the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea) against the backdrop of increasing Korean Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending. The Korean government, armed with its developmental success, is now seeking an enhanced role in the world of international aid by building “the Korean model of ODA”. In particular, the area of urban development has been playing an important role in this model-building effort, with Korea placing a special emphasis on the overseas infrastructure development market to boost its national economy. In this process, there appears to be a tendency to present the country’s development experiences as a reference point for other countries in the Global South to emulate. Korea’s condensed urbanization and industrialization, accompanied by the expansion of new cities and industrial complexes across the country, have become an attractive “model” to aspire to, even if the fruits of such development may not have been equitably shared across geographies and generations (Shin, Zhao and Koh, 2020).

Work for this book started in response to recent calls among some contributors to pay academic attention to current ODA programs in Korea, particularly those focused on the way urban development experiences are interpreted and formulated as a “model”. So far, there has been a substantial body of literature on the Korean ODA based on its economic and social development experiences (see Kim and Kim, 2014a; Yi and Mkandawire, 2014). However, the urban dimension of the Korean ODA has not been sufficiently charted, despite the fact that the Korean government has placed an additional emphasis on “model-building” to market the country’s urban development experiences in the Global South. Often, such experiences have been reinterpreted in a way that dissociates them from their historical, socioeconomic and political contexts, repackaging them in pursuit of the narrowly defined national interest. The size of Korean ODA spending on overseas urban development is already huge and is getting larger; however, academic reflections on what it means to learn from Korea have been lacking. Against this backdrop, the contributors to this book attempt to make critical reassessments of the Korean urban development experience while shedding light on the contextual understanding of such experiences. In this way, this book hopes to ensure that Korea’s contributions to the international cooperation to build more equitable, resilient and sustainable urban futures occur in a manner that does not impose Korea’s decontextualized version of urban development on other countries.

Korea’s unique position in international cooperation

To some extent, Korea represents a rare “success” story for an ODA recipient, transforming itself from a poverty-stricken and war-torn country to the world’s 11th largest economy within five decades. Korea graduated from an aid recipient country when it paid off its final structural adjustment loan to the World Bank in 1995, and was removed from the OECD’s list of recipient nations in 2000. Korea had joined the group of international donor countries when it established the Economic Development Cooperation Fund (EDCF) to provide concessional loans in 1987 and launched the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in 1991 to deal with grant aids. After joining the OECD in 1996 and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2010, Korea became an influential emerging donor in the world of international cooperation. In this regard, Korea occupies a unique position in the landscape of international cooperation.

In fact, even among emerging donors, Korea enjoys an idiosyncratic position. The literature on emerging and non-traditional donors has stressed that the aid they provide is grounded in different motivations from those of traditional donors (Mawdsley, Kim and Marcondes, 2017). Unlike traditional Western donors, who have been motivated by geopolitical and/or humanitarian interests, the emerging donors, led by China in particular, have been concerned more with the economic opportunities afforded by ODA. US aid to Afghanistan is considered to be motivated by geopolitical concerns, whereas China’s aid to Nigeria is often regarded as being driven by China’s economic interest in the oil market. The Korean ODA also shares a common feature with emerging donors in terms of its emphasis on the role of ODA for trade promotion. Moreover, like other emerging donors, Korea shows a low ODA/GNI (Gross National Income) ratio, a high percentage of concessional loans and tied aid, and a large number of recipients (Chun, Munyi and Lee, 2010). On the other hand, Korea exemplifies interesting differences from other emerging donors. Unlike other emerging donors, after joining the OECD/DAC, Korea has made a consistent effort to emulate traditional donors by constantly increasing the ODA/GNI ratio and by trying to conform to the norms and rules upheld by traditional donors (Kim, 2019). The OECD Development Co-operation Peer Reviews 2018 indicated that “Korea deserves praise” in its efforts to follow the recommendations of the Peer Reviews 2012 (OECD, 2018).

The ambivalent position of Korea in international aid is attributable to the nation’s two different—and sometimes poorly coordinated—motivations within its ODA strategy, namely, the mercantilist interest and the diplomatic interest. On the one hand, in line with other emerging donors, Korea has placed a strong emphasis on “aid for trade” and has tried to utilize ODA as a tool for expanding business opportunities for Korean private firms abroad. This push has come mostly from the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Korea (MOEF)—responsible for the nation’s economic affairs and budget distribution—through the use of ODA programs such as EDCF and KSP (Knowledge Sharing Program). On the other hand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and its implementation arm, KOICA, have a different policy priority, which is to enhance Korea’s presence on the global diplomatic stage, often described as “middle power diplomacy” (Howe, 2015). This strategy involves finding a niche in the international aid market for Korea, which has fewer resources and less experience compared to its counterparts. All the efforts of the Korean government to follow the international norms given by the OECD/DAC and to take an active role in international cooperation—such as hosting Busan HLF-4 in 2011—seem to arise from this motivation.

These two different motives create a barrier to a more integrated and coordinated ODA policy, particularly the coordination between grant and loan programs. They are also a source of fragmented ODA programs in Korea where many agencies from central and local governments seek their own organizational interests in the ODA market (OECD, 2018). It should be noted, however, that the situation reflects the unique developmental position of Korea, which is situated between the advanced economies and the Global South. As an OECD member state, Korea seeks to increase its role on the international diplomatic stage by emulating the practices of traditional donors. However, at the same time, as a nation that is still catching up with the major advanced economies, Korea faces strong pressure, particularly from domestic politics, for its ODA to contribute to expanding economic opportunity.

“Modeling” the Korean urban development experience

Self-referencing is, perhaps, the most distinctive feature of the Korean ODA strategy. The Korean government seems to regard the nation’s development experience as a valuable asset, particularly when it comes to its efforts to find a niche in the international aid world. A large part of Korea’s ODA programs builds on its reputation as a development success.

It is often noted that Korea emphasizes the role of knowledge in development cooperation (Doucette and Müller, 2016). For instance, the KSP, which started in 2004 as a key ODA platform for Korea, is focused on knowledge sharing with the Global South. KSP particularly stresses the Korean experience of economic development, highlighting that “Korea’s development experience contains practical solutions accumulated through trial and error, and its knowledge of successes and failures is a great asset for developing countries to help take on development challenges and promote sustainable growth” (KSP homepage, www.ksp.go.kr, last accessed March 30, 2020). KSP was launched by the MOEF and is implemented by three agencies, each one focusing on a different area of engagement: the Korea Development Institute (KDI) on socioeconomic development, the Export–Import Bank of Korea (EXIM Bank) on construction and infrastructure and the Korea Trade–Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) on trade and investment. All these are government organizations that have played pivotal roles in the course of Korea’s economic development. At the time of writing, KSP has reportedly conducted 427 projects with 76 partner countries across the globe so far (ibid.) and has consolidated its role as an iconic program of the Korean ODA (see Potter, 2019 for a critical assessment of KSP).

Shortly after joining the OECD/DAC in 2010, the Korean government attempted to improve its ODA strategy based on its own development experience. In 2012, the Korean government released a report, the Korean Model of ODA Strategy, in an effort to reorganize its development experience from an international cooperation perspective. The report pointed out that partner countries had allegedly been making strong demands for Korea to share its development experiences, which these countries would emulate Korea (The Korean Government, 2012). More importantly, however, the report emphasized that the Korean ODA should be more focused in terms of target areas and delivery processes in order to overcome the drawbacks caused by a lack of experience and the limited ODA budget. According to the report, the Korean ODA was to aim at “the sustainable development of partner countries, focusing on the demand and conditions of partner countries … based on the comparative advantage of our development experience” (ibid., p. 16). In accordance with this aim, the report identified the key features of the Korean development experience and provided principles, strategies, and major programs tailor-made for diverse regions (ibid.).

One of the efforts to build “the Korean model” can be seen in the interpretation of the Saemaul (New Village) movement, which was a government-initiated rural development campaign in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement was quickly adopted as a flagship ODA program in 2016. KOICA and other state agencies have embarked on a worldwide campaign to disseminate Korea’s rural development experiences under the banner of “Global Saemaul”, which includes leadership training as well as other rural development practices (Jeong, 2017; Kim and Kang, 2015). The “Global Saemaul” strategy implies that this “model” can be applied in Global South countries regardless of their different social and economic backgrounds. The “Global Saemaul model” played a significant role in the recent history of Korean ODA under the previous government (2013–2017), which inherited a political legacy from the authoritarian regime (1961–1979) that organized the Saemaul Movement (Doucette and Müller, 2016).

In a similar vein, attempts to reproduce the “Korean model” can also be witnessed in the area of urban development, which has aimed at elevating the status of Korean urban development experiences to a pre-packaged commodity and a model that can be marketed to the Global South. Urban development—including infrastructure investment—has special importance in Korea, not only because it has played a crucial role in Korea’s economic and social development, but also because the country’s overseas construction market accounts for a significant share of the national GDP (around 4–6 percent 2015–2018, www.index.go.kr). As such, urban development is crucial for sustaining the national economy. Against this backdrop, the model-building of the urban development experience for ODA has emerged alongside efforts to enhance business opportunities for the urban development sector in the overseas market (see Martin and Geglia, 2019).

One of the notable examples that epitomizes such practices is the ODA strategy to export the experience of new town construction under the banner of “city export” (see Chapter 9 in this volume by Yu-Min Joo). The phrase “city export” began to emerge in the mainstream media when Korean construction companies such as POSCO and GS Construction made an inroad into condominium complex development markets in Vietnam, Mongolia and Algeria in the mid-2000s, a process that has been dubbed the “Korean Wave in construction” (Munwha Daily, 2007). Soon afterwards, the concept entered into government discourses to become “the Korean model of urban development”. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) and its affiliate Land Corporation were quick to use the “city export” concept to package their new city development projects, thus implanting “the Korean style of new city” in countries such as Kuwait and Azerbaijan (Meil Daily, 2009). The Seoul Metropolitan Government has also been active, under the slogan of “city export”, to share its urban policy innovations—ranging from public transportation to e-government—with cities of the Global South. The recent smart city promotion of the Korean government is a new addition to this “city export” strategy (Han, 2019; Noh, 2019).¹ Basically, while these are all public initiatives, they are obviously intended to boost overseas market shares for Korean private firms.

However, as pointed out by Chua (2011), efforts to export a country’s development experiences as a “model” are problematic because it is inherently difficult, if not impossible, to crystalize “the model” from historical and place-specific development experiences. Korea is not an exception in this regard. As pointed out by critics (for example, Kim and Kim, 2014b; Igbafen, 2014), it would be naïve to describe the Korean development experience as a singular and uniform narrative.² Korean development experiences can be differently interpreted depending on which timeframe one considers and which industrial sector or policy area one looks at. For instance, state policy toward the financial sector in the 1990s may be understood in a completely different way from that in the 1960s. The relation between the state and market in the manufacturing sector in the 1980s would have been different from the one in the social welfare sector during the same period. If one takes the political democratization of the late 1980s into consideration, one’s interpretation of the Korean development experience would become even more complicated. Historical context, therefore, matters when it comes to transferring a country’s development experiences elsewhere. In this regard, the aforementioned effort to export the rural development experience in the form of the “Global Saemaul model” can be said to have reduced the complex, multi-scalar experiences of rural development to a set of technical issues of resource allocation or a simple question of how the government successfully cultivates the spirit of development (Doucette and Müller, 2016). The complexity of the Korean development experience has made it difficult to construct a so-called “Korean model” that can be simplified and thus transferred or exported to the Global South.

We can see a similar difficulty in the Korean ODA strategy accompanying efforts to build “the Korean model of urban development”, which is the focus of this book. In this model-building discourse, the model presents itself as a one-size-fits-all solution to recipient countries. It is hard to see what components from past urban development experiences would constitute the “Korea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Introduction: Reconsidering the Korean urban development experience for international cooperation
• Part I Outlining the urban transformation of Korea
• Part II Modeling the Korean urban development experience
• Part III Policies and institutions of Korean urban development
• Index