Green Growth, Neoliberalism and Conflicting Hegemonic Interests: The Case of Korea

Abstract

The 2009 South Korean Presidential Committee on Green Growth set a long-term vision for South Korea to “go green.” The Green Growth Korea (GGK) initiative has been instrumental in the formation of the international Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). The initiative is heralded as a qualitatively new and exportable growth paradigm. The paper argues that the narrative on “newness” is a myth and that green growth represents a continuity of elite-led responses to the contradictions of capital accumulation in the South Korean developmentalist state. These splits in hegemonic “leadership” are a result of the uneven relationship between domestic and transnational Chaebol interests, and the political interests of the developmentalist state and the promotion of South Korea as “global Korea.” This is creating an economy based on a developmentalist model that has provided the conditions for a decoupling of the economy from big business interests, which have been integral to developmentalist success. These economic interests remain reliant on the economic and political policies of the developmentalist state, which these interests are undermining. Green growth is an elite-led narrative that obscures these elite conflicts under the banner of Korean green growth nationalism.

Keywords:

• green growth
• Korea
• development
• transnational interests

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Academic Editor Chen Shuoying and the three anonymous referees for their constructive comments.

Notes on Contributor

Iain Watson is an assistant professor at the Department of International Development and Cooperation, Ajou University, Korea. He received his PhD from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. As a teaching associate he taught international politics at Durham University, UK, and at the United Nations Peace University (UPeace) in Seoul, Korea. His works on Korean politics have been published in journals such as Journal of Contemporary Asia, Contemporary Politics, Asian Journal of Political Science, Globalizations, Asian Politics and Policy, The Pacific Review, Asian Studies Review and Geopolitics. His forthcoming book Foreign Aid and Emerging Powers: Asian Perspectives on Official Development Assistance will be published by Routledge in July 2014. From January to March 2013, he was a visiting academic at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), Oxford University, UK.

Notes

¹For the domestic political debate on this from a liberal perspective see Kwak (2013).

²On NGO responses, see “Green Growth Policy of the Korean Government and Its Critics.” http://green-korea.tistory.com/101.

³See “Top Firms Fare Well in Overseas Resource Development in 2012.” Yonhap News Agency. http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/fullstory/2013/07/28/95/4500000000AEN20130728001500320F.HTML.

⁴See “Beyond Korean Style: Shaping a New Growth Formula.” http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/beyond_korean_style.

⁵This institute focuses on cultivating public diplomacy to win “trust” from the South Korean electorate. There is a sense that this is a conventional Conservative narrative of “order” and that the anti-government protests do not so much represent democracy but social “disharmony.”