From development to development cooperation: foreign aid, country ownership, and the developmental state in South Korea

Abstract

As an emerging donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA), the South Korean government has announced that it will provide a ‘South Korean Model of Development Cooperation’. This paper explores how the South Korean development experience from the twentieth century can be transformed into an alternative for development cooperation in the twenty-first century. The early aid management system in South Korea contributed to the bureaucratic capacity-building that was necessary for the installation of the developmental state. In its quest for industrialization, the authoritarian developmental state in South Korea maintained autonomy vis-à-vis foreign donors, foretelling the ‘country ownership’ principle in today's global norms of ODA. However instructive the South Korean experience may be, it will not work as a ‘one size fits all’ model for the twenty-first century development due to such fundamental changes in the global political economy as the WTO regime and democracy promotion. In this regard, South Korea's own double transition of economic liberalization and democratization offers another important lesson. Therefore, we suggest a South Korean ‘alternative’ that respects both the global norms for development cooperation and the national democratic aspirations. It would be a democratic developmental state whose autonomy is more deeply embedded in civil society and whose capacity further expands human capabilities.

Keywords:

• Democratic developmental state
• foreign aid
• country ownership
• development cooperation

Notes

1. Kim Hyŏn-ch’ŏl, known to US authorities as Henry Kim, personifies the link between the aid management system and the economic development plan. At the time, Kim was both the Minister of Reconstruction and the Korean representative in the CEB (National Archives of Korea 2006: 341). He resurfaced as the chair of the EPB in 1962, when the Park regime launched the First Five Year Economic Development Plan.

2. Eugene Black, the president of the World Bank at the time, is said to have made the following remarks with respect to South Korean HCI: ‘There are three myths in a developing country. The first is construction of express ways, the second is construction of an integrated steel mill, and the third is construction of a monument for the head of state’ (Kim 2011: 159–60). See also Brazinsky (2005: 111–12).

3. This is one of the main arguments for those who see the developmental state model limited primarily to the Northeast Asian capitalist economies under the Cold War US hegemony (Woo-Cumings 1998; Zhu 2002). On the other hand, there are others who think that the model can be detached from the historical context and applied more broadly (Hayashi 2010; Vu 2010).

4. A more thoroughgoing discussion, involving the ‘good governance’ agenda, can be found in Fritz and Menocal (2006, 2007).

5. See Jung (2010) for KOICA and Lim et al. (2010) for the KSP.