Toward sustainable development? Trend analysis of environmental policy in Korea from 1987 to 2040

Abstract

It is crucial to observe how international policy initiatives are implemented in each country’s environmental policies to ensure global environmental conservation and sustainable development. This study aims to comprehensively analyze the trend of environmental policy in Korea over time. To this aim, we use semantic network analysis to explore the main keywords and to identify the characteristics of the key themes in each period based on the national environmental comprehensive plan. Our results show that the value of economic growth and technological development are regarded as priorities in Korean environmental policy because the economy and technology are closely related to the environment. Similarly, when it comes to the fundamental concept of environmental policy, the concept of “green growth” is applied in preference to the concept of “sustainability.” The results contribute to expanding the approach of existing policy research by providing the potential for semantic network analysis based on policy documents.

Keywords:

• Korea’s environmental policy
• sustainability
• green growth
• network analysis
• policy documents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2021S1A3A2A01087370).