Eun-Sung Kim

The politics of climate change policy design in Korea

Abstract The climate change policy design of the Lee Myung-bak administration was the outcome of interest group politics around the greenhouse gas and energy target management scheme, carbon taxes, and the emission-trading scheme. Using qualitative methods, this research examines powerful stakeholders and their interests at play in Korea’s climate change policymaking processes. It also links the political economy of climate change policy to the legacy of the ‘developmental state’ and examines environmental developmentalism in the design of the three climate change policies. The Lee administration strongly promoted environmental developmentalism, which created a new growth engine in an environmental field, while bolstering manufacturing businesses and excluding the views of environmental non-governmental organisations from the target-management and the emission-trading schemes. The Lee administration also sought to facilitate pro-business measures such as low taxes, which led it to reject a carbon tax. Therefore, environmental developmentalism was central to the politics of the Lee administration’s climate change policy design.

The sensory power of cameras and noise meters for protest surveillance in South Korea

This article analyzes sensory aspects of material politics in social movements, focusing on two police tools: evidence-collecting cameras and noise meters for protest surveillance. Through interviews with Korean political activists, this article examines the relationship between power and the senses in the material culture of Korean protests and asks why cameras and noise meters appeared in order to control contemporary peaceful protests in the 2000s. The use of cameras and noise meters in contemporary peaceful protests evidences the exercise of what Michel Foucault calls ‘micro-power’. Building on material culture studies, this article also compares the visual power of cameras with the sonic power of noise meters, in terms of a wide variety of issues: the control of things versus words, impacts on protest size, differential effects on organizers and participants, and differences in timing regarding surveillance and punishment.

The material culture of Korean social movements

Through interviews with Korean political activists, this research explores the material culture of Korean social movements, with a particular focus on artifacts of the police and protesters from the 1980s to the 2000s. First, the article analyses the symbolic meaning of artifacts and their sensory–emotional impact on protesters. Second, it explores the relationship between artifacts and protest culture, looking at how artifacts concern the gendered performance and hierarchical culture of protesters. Finally, the author examines the correlation between artifacts and protest space in terms of how the emergence of artifacts involves the availability and mobility of protest space. Through artifacts, protesters’ emotions are less spiritual than sensory or corporeal. Hierarchical and gendered aspects of protest culture depend on the types of protest artifacts and their use in protest performances. The use of artifacts in protest performances is restricted by the characteristics of protest space.

Sound and the Korean Public: Sonic Citizenship in the Governance of Apartment Floor Noise Conflicts

Apartment floor noise is becoming a serious social problem in South Korea. Apartment floor noise conflicts arise from the disruption of neighbourhood community in Korean apartment complexes. To resolve the conflicts, the Korean government and apartment residents employ two modes of governance: technocratic and collaborative. These models of governance create legal and community standards of floor noise that constitute sonic citizenship—the status of residents as normal listeners with both the duty to reduce noise and the right to make noise. Using Sheila Jasanoff’s idea of ‘constitutive coproduction’, floor noise in the form of sonic knowledge is constitutively coproduced with sonic citizenship in the form of public knowledge. When apartment residents cannot bear normal sound, defined by the two modes of governance, they become abnormal listeners. If normal listeners cannot put up with the level of sound from upstairs, this sound becomes floor noise. Sonic knowledge is, therefore, vital to the construction of sonic citizenship. In technocratic governance, sonic citizenship emerges from the limits of endurance in governmental floor noise standards, based on results of an auditory perception test based on noise and vibration engineering. In collaborative governance, sonic citizenship results from voluntary agreements between apartment residents. Through such governances, governmental officials and apartment residents perceive a distinction between normal and abnormal residents or between normal and abnormal apartment life.

Technocratic precautionary principle: Korean risk governance of genetically modified organisms

Regulations for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Korea fluctuate between technocracy and the precautionary principle (PP). Technocratic PP denotes the coexistence, or coproduction, of technocracy with PP – a complex ensemble of technocratic, precautionary policies, and hybrids of the two. This paper analyzes four types of PP-based policies linked to Korean GMO regulations: foresight and monitoring of risk; reverse burden of proof; public participation; and the publics right to know. Korean GMO regulations are consistent with the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, a type of PP, but lack long-term risk assessment as well as public participation. Technocracy is embedded both in advance informed agreements as a reverse burden of proof and in proof-based GMO labeling as a right-to-know policy. Technocratic PP results in inconsistencies between PP and technocratic epistemology and the gap between PP-based institutions and technocratic practices. Technocratic PP is therefore a typical phenomenon that occurs in the “glocalization” of risk regulation.

How did enterprise risk management first appear in the Korean public sector

This research addresses the rise and fall of the Crisis Management Guideline of Public Organizations (CMGPO) from a historical perspective. In the Korean public sector, as a form of enterprise risk management (ERM), CMGPO is not designed to be merely a tool of financial risk management but also to be a policy tool for crisis management. CMGPO emerged within the conflict between integrated crisis management and dispersed crisis management. The purpose of CMGPO is to bureaucratically integrate the crisis management of public organizations with the governmental crisis management system. ERM as a form of self-regulation is entangled with the pre-existing command and control of the Korean government over integrated crisis management. As a result, CMGPO is characterized as ‘enforced self-regulation’ rather than self-regulation; this is a fundamental idea in ERM.

Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Globalization of Converging Technology Policy: Technological Developmentalism in South Korea

ABSTRACT The United States (US), European Union (EU), and South Korea had different definitions and visions of technological convergence before interacting with each other from the late 2000s. The Korean government has used Western policies as a benchmark but produces a distinct concept of technological convergence due to a particular imaginary of technology as a vehicle for national economic growth. This sociotechnical imaginary of technological developmentalism influences Korea’s translation of technological convergence from other jurisdictions. Because the sociotechnical imaginaries of different nations are difficult to communicate across national contexts, the translation of visions often changes the original meaning of things like technological convergence. Western sociotechnical imaginaries such as human enhancement and sustainable development do not translate well into South Korea due to the national imaginary of technological developmentalism. First, Korea’s Lee administration predominantly envisioned converging technology (CT) as a new growth engine, in contrast to the US and EU which emphasize visions of trans-humanist or sustainable futures respectively. Second, the Park administration’s CT vision imitates the Western societal challenge-driven rationale, but this vision was not enacted. As such, the democratic, sustainable imaginary of societal challenge-driven innovation is not easily translated into Korea’s national imaginary or technology policy.

Senses and artifacts in market transactions: the Korean case of agricultural produce auctions

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the senses, artifacts, and trade at South Korean agricultural produce auctions. It explores the impacts of market devices on sensory interactions between auctioneers and buyers that are essential to market transactions. Through ethnographic interviews and participant observations at Garak Market, Seoul, this study compares hand signal trading with electronic trading in agricultural produce auctions. It analyzes how the senses affect auction price estimation and formation, as well as their contribution to economic agency and social relationship among economic actors. The study then examines the impact of new market devices in electronic trading (e.g. trading screens, computer monitors, and wireless bidding terminals) on trading’s sensory aspects of seeing or hearing. It argues that the devices change the modality of sensory interactions between auctioneers and buyers. This transforms power struggles, forming a looser but more equal relationship between auctioneers and buyers and decreasing the overall auction price in the market.

The construction of scientific uncertainty and evidentiary hierarchy in the Camp Carroll controversy

The Camp Carroll controversy occurred in the aftermath of testimony given by three veteran United States soldiers, who stated that the Eighth US Army buried Agent Orange at Camp Carroll in South Korea during the late 1970s. This paper focuses on three scientific debates arising from the activities of the ROK–US Joint Investigation Team, which conducted an extensive probe into this allegation over a period of eight months. Critically engaging with Silvio Funtowicz and Jarome Ravetz’s typology of scientific uncertainty, the paper explores how scientific uncertainty is apparent in these debates, and how the Joint Investigation Team determined the hierarchy of evidence when finalizing its report. The main findings are summarized below. The Joint Investigation Team examined interview, documentary, and scientific evidence in order to prove the alleged burial of Agent Orange at Camp Carroll. The investigation faced technical, methodological, and epistemological challenges by various stakeholders. In the absence of contradictory scientific and documentary evidence, the team rejected interview evidence from the former United States Forces Korea veterans, in accordance with a technocratic approach to evidentiary hierarchy. Scientific uncertainty was used as a shield to block the institutional discussion of and therefore revision to the US–ROK Status of Forces Agreement. The conclusion highlights my critical thinking about Funtowicz and Ravetz’s concept of scientific uncertainty.

Governance struggles in the case of Camp Carroll conflict

This research examines the multifaceted governance struggles associated with the alleged burial of Agent Orange at Camp Carroll in Chilgok County, Korea. To deal with this incident, the Korea central government forms bureaucratic conflict management system, which can be characterised as a joint response system, a one-voice system for press briefing, and an intergovernmental joint supporting group. However, this system conflicts with the participatory governance of local governments and civic society. This research explores why the Korean central governments bureaucratic conflict management prevails over the participatory governance of local governments and environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs). It argues that the Status of Forces Agreement between Korea and the USA provides the Korean central government with a reason to curb the participation of local governments and environment NGOs in the governance of Camp Carroll conflict.