Abstract
The paper examines the domestic politics surrounding South Korea's foreign aid policy. It delineates the institutional characteristics and strategic interests of key government and non-government stakeholders, and suggests an analytical framework to comprehend the country's aid policy regime. It suggests that two competing policy discourses exist – one emphasising ‘intellectual leadership’ and the other ‘ethical leadership’ as the key principle of aid policy. In practice, the country's political leadership promulgates a complex amalgam of these discourses in alignment with their own political imperatives and interests. The paper discusses ‘Global Saemaul Undong’ as such an example under the incumbent Park Geun-Hye administration.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/aidtopoorcountriesslipsfurtherasgovernmentstightenbudgets.htm (accessed 31 October 2013). However, as of summer 2014, it seems the 2015 pledge is not likely to be met.
2 Lancaster (Citation2007: 23) notes that such turf wars are common among donors: ‘the organization of aid influences the purpose of aid from within government through the unity and status of the competing voices supporting aid's various uses in government decision-making circles. Further, once established, the organization of a government's aid system institutionalizes the interests within government and, thus, the purposes of aid’.
3 The survey was conducted on a voluntary basis. Seventy-six per cent of KCOC members and 25 per cent of non-members responded to the questionnaire. Details on respondents and methodology can be found in the KCOC (Citation2012a) report.
4 Lancaster (Citation2007:140–1) also discusses similar concerns in the case of Japanese NGOs.
5 Since South Korea's 2010 accession broke more than 10 years of hiatus in DAC's enlargement after Greek membership in 1999, five new members were accepted in 2013 alone: Czech Republic, Iceland, Slovak Republic, Poland and Slovenia.
6 See Rosen (Citation2014) on the Saemaul ODA case of Rwanda.
7 For instance, the country announced in early 2014 that it will join the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).