Urban water governance as policy boosterism: Seoul’s legitimation at the local and global scale

Introduction

The visibility of water infrastructure is a valuable indicator of the changing relationship between a specific city and its water facilities. Jones (2017), for instance, observed how the London Metropolitan Water Board’s Laboratory Building, once a national landmark representing drinking water as the embodiment of scientific and technological innovation, has lost visibility in contemporary London. In contrast, in another global city, Seoul, water infrastructure has been provided significant visibility through the creation of facilities that aim to promote the local supply system from a historical, paedagogical and ecological perspective. The current article studies the international promotion of Seoul’s water management policy as a leverage to boost the city’s reputation. The study unearths the coexistence of different drivers underpinning the international entrepreneurship and delves into the local and translocal constitution of reputation.

In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, this article deploys the empirical case of the international promotion of Seoul’s water management policy to deepen the understanding of translocal relations, conceptualised as the ‘policies, politics, and interactions of local governments and actors in the globalized world’ (Lee, 2015: 1), by tapping into what could be identified as a ‘conceptual gap’ between the disciplines of urban studies and international relations (Herrschel and Newman, 2017). As city governments increasingly venture beyond their national boundaries, scholarly efforts are called upon to blend the focus on the everyday lives and local scale common in urban scholarship and the macro-analytical perspective traditionally associated with international studies (Acuto, 2013). This article takes the baton by charting an analytical path that engages with the converging political and geographical accounts that underpin the analysis of transnational urban politics. It does so by investigating the theoretical intersection of the body of literature on policy mobilities in urban geography and the body of literature on practices and sources of legitimation in international studies. Legitimacy is the common analytical ground for this interdisciplinary dialogue.

Challenging the ‘state-centredness’ of much conventional literature on policy transfer, the research on policy mobilities has contributed to shedding light on the processes of social construction of urban policy knowledge, gazing beyond ‘methodological nationalism’ and its emphasis on the role of official state actors in learning processes, and unveiling the simultaneous characterisation of policy as territorial and relational, being both intrinsically related to local interests and in constant motion across networks (McCann, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2010; Peck and Theodore, 2015). The impact of one locality over the other and the unfolding of urban politics within the context of the social relations that cities maintain with each other foregrounds the analytical relevance of the complex relationship between the local and the global (Jonas et al., 2018). Local and extra-local elements are assembled in social practices of legitimation through which policy-makers aim to garner political support from their local community and raise their expertise around specific policy solutions globally (Temenos and McCann, 2012). The way legitimacy claims are mobilised in this process diverts our attention towards the debate on the practices and sources of legitimation in the field of international studies.

Legitimacy is granted as the result of an intersubjective process whereby social actors assess the normative acceptability of an actor or action (Reus-Smit, 2014). This intersubjective process, defined legitimation, is enacted through the discursive mobilisation of legitimacy beliefs and the assessment of their normative acceptability in line with multiple sources of legitimacy (Schneider et al., 2007; Tallberg and Zürn, 2019). The attachment to substantive values, such as shared principles or objectives, and the possession of specialist knowledge are commonly conceptualised as fundamental sources of legitimacy in world politics, in addition to the widely diffused understanding of legitimacy as adherence to procedures and capacity of performance (Hurrell, 2005; Scharpf, 1999). Extending, once again, our gaze beyond the traditional unit of analysis of the state, legitimation is a social practice that connects any institution with its community, where state and non-state actors may be simultaneously both producers and audiences of legitimation practices, since each legitimation practice can be simultaneously self-legitimation by the ruler and validation of the legitimacy claims by the ruled (Bäckstrand and Söderbaum, 2018; Bernstein, 2011; Zaum, 2013).

Connecting the dots, there is a promising interdisciplinary bridge between the body of work on policy mobilities and international studies as urban policy-makers are increasingly active beyond their municipal borders in social practices of legitimation that are inherently relational. The article illustrates the merits of this common analytical ground by presenting the international promotion of Seoul’s water management policy as a social practice of legitimation that is simultaneously local and global. The article proposes heuristically to approach this empirical phenomenon by deploying the theoretical framework of ‘policy boosterism’. Building on the literature on urban entrepreneurship (e.g. Harvey, 1989) and urban policy mobilities (e.g. McCann and Ward, 2011), McCann (2013) developed the concept of policy boosterism to refer to branding strategies of city commodification around specific successful policies where the supply side aims to enhance the reputation of the policies, professionals and cities involved, while the demand side seeks to quickly implement successful solutions, often under mounting demands and financial constraints.

Policy boosterism is here proposed not in order to dissect the relationship of the city government of Seoul with a specific subset of subnational governments around urban water governance. It is rather deployed in order to shed light on how the extra-local – be it the comparison with another locality, the export of a specific policy solution, or the resort to a source of legitimacy beyond local borders – is constantly present in the promotion of Seoul’s water management policy as both a cause and effect and how this, in turn, is deeply related with inherently local dynamics. This local component, as we will see, offers an additional layer of complexity as the international promotion is driven by the intertwining of public and private interests.

The article is organised as follows. The next section lays out the main drivers underpinning the expanding transnational dynamism of cities, calling to adopt a wider spectrum beyond the reductionist focus on economic rationality. It then introduces us to Seoul as the paradigmatic example of a global city where the city government is actively seeking to enhance its own reputation as local administration. The analysis of the international promotion of Seoul’s water management policy and its tap water Arisu as an empirical case of policy boosterism allows us to grasp the local and global mutual constitution of the sources and practices of legitimation, unearthing the blend of solidarity- and profit-based drivers beneath the assemblage of political and business interests invested in the transnational promotion. Before the conclusion, the article discusses the international political agency of cities and the dialectical tension between local progressive policy-making and the global-scale neoliberal agenda of privatisation of public assets. The research is designed as a single-case study and draws upon qualitative methodologies. The study relies on document analysis of extensive textual and semiotic material produced for a foreign audience by the city government of Seoul and its institutional partners over the last decade, as well as interviews with city government officials in the areas of waterworks and international cooperation.

Cities in a changing landscape of entrepreneurship and policy learning

With the convergence of globalisation and urbanisation as key driving forces, cities have gained international momentum in today’s world. Cities have initially stepped into the international arena to capture capital and labour into what Harvey (1989) defined as the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ of urban governance. Parallel to these initiatives of inter-urban competition and place-based strategies, against the weak capacity of national governments to tackle contemporary pressing global problems (e.g. climate change), and mindful of being in the frontline when experiencing the consequences of these challenges, cities have leveraged the growing importance of networked forms of governance in order to enhance their contribution to collective decision-making processes.

With the defining demographic and economic characteristics of the current ‘urban age’ recasting the potential role of cities in global policy agendas, the sustainability discourse has shifted from understanding the city as a source of problems to seeing it as a source of solutions, situating cities among state and non-state actors in the multi-actor and multi-level configurations that underpin global governance (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020; Martinez et al., 2021; Weiss, 2011). In this context, cities from across the world have increasingly connected to innovate and learn from each other around numerous fields of urban policy (Campbell, 2012). Whereas globalisation has led to an increased export of policy lessons including those dimensions of public policy that have been devolved from the state to the sub-national level (Stone, 2008), transnational urban policy transfer has further been enhanced by the improvement of distance-based learning and communication technologies (Harris and Moore, 2013).

In sum, the attraction of attention and resources lays the foundation for the international-oriented entrepreneurship of cities in the last decades. This objective, however, translates in different ways empirically. In parallel to common market-based strategies, cities harness their key internal policies as value-added elements to share among peers in order to enhance their international reputation (Fernández de Losada and Garcia-Chueca, 2018). As demonstrated by the notorious campaigns of cities committed to enforce, at local level, human rights sanctioned by the international community (e.g. Leffel, 2018), the ongoing internationalisation of cities cannot be grasped solely on the grounds of the (yet fundamental) thesis on the neoliberalisation of urban governance (Pinson, 2019). The concept of the ‘global city’ refers to the prominent literature on cities as spatial concentrations of corporations that interweave the global interconnected economy (e.g. Sassen, 1991), but also to the global reach of city governments that engage in transnational actions (Nijman, 2016). The current paper delves into the complexities underpinning the transnational dynamism of cities by studying the international entrepreneurship of Seoul, particularly around the promotion of its water management policy and tap water Arisu.

Seoul: The struggle for recognition of a global city

Seoul is a paradigmatic example of the concentration of wealth and innovation that global cities enact in today’s economy. Seoul metropolitan area accounts for almost half of the national GDP of South Korea (OECD Stat, 2017), with a population that ranges from almost 10 million to over 24 million inhabitants if we take into account a larger number of municipalities within the urban agglomeration (City Population, 2019; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UNDESA], 2019). As the capital of a centralised developmental state that has recently experienced a decentralisation agenda, Seoul is the national gateway of the globe-spanning flows activated by the operations of Korean multinational corporations (Clark and Moonen, 2017).

In this context, governmental actors have played an essential role in boosting Seoul’s competitiveness. Examples of the efforts to plug the metropolitan economy into global networks can be observed in the development of industry clusters (Bok and Coe, 2018) or the building ex-novo of the smart city Songdo International Business District in the nearby Incheon (Murray, 2018). Clearly, a fundamental component of the business-friendly strategy stems from the international recognition granted by accolades such as the World Design Capital 2010 within the creative city arena, the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development 2016 for the promotion of the sharing economy or the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize 2018 for its urban regeneration projects.

Notably, mirroring other cities from across the world, the city government of Seoul – Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) – has invested significant resources in raising its own profile as local administration. While, arguably, these efforts are ultimately geared towards improving the reputation of the urban fabric of Seoul as a whole, there is an inherent difference. Contrary to business-friendly initiatives that are embedded in an economic rationality, this second type of international entrepreneurship revolves around the perceived reputation of local policy-making actors in their own right. It targets different types of institutional actors, pursues political objectives and connects with different sources of legitimacy.

The construction of Arisu as policy boosterism

Seoul’s tap water, Arisu, supplies water to over 10 million people in the metropolitan area. Arisu, dubbed after the old name of the local Han River, is currently operated by Seoul Waterworks Authority (SWA), an agency established in 1989 with around 2000 employees (SWA, 2016). Awarded and certified by several national and international specialised institutions, Arisu is a central element of SMG’s international strategy on policy knowledge transfer and decentralised development cooperation. Defined through different branding representations such as ‘Seoul’s water recognized by the world’ (SWA, 2015) or ‘Korea’s representative drinking water’ (SWA, n.d.-a), Arisu is the subject matter of inter-urban cooperation training workshops held regularly by SWA ¹ and the Seoul Human Resource Development Center (SHRDC), ² as well as in connection with initiatives organised by the two international cooperation divisions of SMG: International Relations Division and Global Urban Partnership Division. This policy knowledge transfer towards foreign cities is further amplified by institutional collaborations with the City Diplomacy Research Center of the think-tank Seoul Institute and Seoul Urban Solutions Agency, including the platform Seoul Solution.

These organisations feed into a larger global ‘informational infrastructure’ (McCann, 2011: 114) of urban policy knowledge allowing SMG to capture attention on policy initiatives in what would otherwise be a vast planetary landscape of seemingly indistinguishable public policy experiences. As the brochure translated into English and labelled as ‘Seoul, ready to share with the world!’ illustrates, ³ this informational infrastructure frames and mobilises specific urban policy knowledge among a variegated geography of transfer agents. It acts as an operative framework that mediates between demand and offer within a logic of policy boosterism, SMG being the supply side interested in enhancing the reputation of its water management policy and the participating cities being the demand side interested in learning from successful solutions implemented elsewhere.

As McCann (2013: 14) argues, policy boosterism is driven by the interweaving of ‘introspective’ and ‘extrospective’ drivers, since its main promoters, members of the ‘local growth machine’ and allied political representatives, simultaneously need to advertise outwardly its reputation comparatively with other cities, perceived as potential competitors for the attraction of mobile capital, labour and tourism, and persuade inwardly the local population in order to obtain political support for the policy initiatives at stake. For instance, Seoul’s water supply performance ranks as the ‘world’s second highest revenue water rate’ after Tokyo and before other global cities from developed countries, such as Paris, New York or London (SWA, 2018: 23). While the promotion of Seoul’s water management policy targets both internal and external audiences, there is not, however, a clearly identifiable local growth machine, if we assume land and property values to be the key engines of urban politics within the understanding of ‘the city as a growth machine’ (Logan and Molotch, 2007: 50). The analysis of the bidirectional local-to-global nexus underpinning the transnational promotion of Arisu sheds a different light on the practices of legitimation.

Clean and safe water as local reputation

Arisu undergoes tap water quality tests for 170 substances, above the quality inspection threshold of 163 substances recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) (SWA, 2016). The commitment to safe drinking water and high-quality service lies beneath the recognition awarded to Seoul through credentials such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 22000 certification on food safety management in 2016 or the International Water Association (IWA) Project Innovation Award in 2010 (SWA, 2015, 2018). This is where the theoretical work in international studies around the sources of legitimacy in global governance can provide us with analytical leverage. Certification standards and prizes such as the ISO and IWA awards play a key legitimising role since the granting institutions are perceived as a source of legitimacy in light of their specialised knowledge and expertise (Hurrell, 2005). Nevertheless, according to a national survey conducted in 2013, only 5% of the participants admitted to drinking tap water directly, stating their main reasons for not doing so as: distrust of water tank and pipeline, distrust of water intake source and odour (Ministry of Environment, 2017). This figure is all the more surprising when compared with the statistics for direct tap water use from water sources in France (70%) or Japan (33%) (Lee et al., 2018). Reports in the past about the state of the water and its pipeline system have led Seoulites to have a low degree of trust in their local tap water (Houri and Koo, 2015).

The policy goal of raising Arisu as the tap water that ‘citizens trust and drink’ (SWA, 2018: 8) recasts the promotion of Seoul’s water not as a case of rentiers and allies’ local growth strategy but rather as the enhancement of municipal public service provision. In other words, in line with the theoretical understanding of legitimation as a social practice connecting the rule and the ruled, as well as an institution with its community, the promotion of Arisu constitutes a self-legitimation strategy carried out by SMG around its responsibility as public service provider rather than a rent-seeking agenda. As such, the registration in 2004 at the Korean Intellectual Property Office, in Korean and English, of the brand Arisu (SWA, n.d.-a) is a component of a larger campaign that aims to improve the public preference for tap water in Seoul. This campaign includes elements of both discourse and practice. The blue and white water drop designed as Arisu logo aims at ‘fully representing the clean, fresh feeling of tap water’, while the two designed characters Ari and Suri are water fairies that ‘find great pleasure in bringing healthy water to children’ (SWA, n.d.-a). Similarly, the launch of the production of Arisu bottled water in 2001 and its quality certification by the National Sanitation Foundation International (NSF) in 2012 (SMG, 2014) reinforce this policy goal. It embodies both a local and translocal perspective as bottled tap water is distributed to low-income households of Seoul metropolitan area (SMG, 2014), and is sent as first aid to disaster-hit areas, such as after the earthquakes in Sichuan and Haiti in 2008 and 2010 respectively (SWA, n.d.-b). Indeed, the replacement of over 97% of the old water piping (SWA, 2016), financial support for old pipe replacement in households (SWA, n.d.-c), and the provision of free water quality tests in households (SWA, 2015) also aim to increase Arisu’s acceptance by the local population. At the same time, the comparative-competitive rationale at the core of policy boosterism is deployed by SMG to show that its tap water fee (0.49 USD/m³) is much lower than other global cities such as London (2.17 USD/m³) or New York (3.13 USD/m³), and also as a consequence of the decision to freeze the cost after an increase in 2012 (SWA, 2018). Therefore, the promotion of Arisu, feeding from both local and global sources of legitimacy, responds ultimately to the policy goal of raising the local acceptance of a basic service provided by a public agency. As such, the ‘rhetorical expression’ of Arisu as ‘made by Seoul and recognized by the UN’ (SWA, n.d.-d), related to the United Nations (UN) Public Service Award received in 2009, ⁴ targets the local population and draws upon the UN as a fundamental institutional source of legitimacy at the global level, intersecting again with the theoretical inputs from the field of international studies. Given that the UN is considered a legitimate institution on the grounds of its universality and inclusiveness (rather than its effectiveness) (Steffek, 2009), it acts as a ‘legitimation forum’, in the sense that its symbolic status grants the multilateral system the ideational power to define the norms that dictate what counts as legitimate (Barnett and Finnemore, 2018).

Nonetheless, the reputational value of Seoul’s water governance unleashes from the local dimension to the global scale too. This, in turn, outlines a field where public and private interests intertwine.

Clean and safe water as foreign business reputation

As the award of an infrastructure development consulting project in PMB Island (Brunei) to Seoul’s public–private consortium in 2012 demonstrates (SMG, 2014), the international reputation in water governance is also a source of translocal economic revenue. As such, SMG operates the Seoul Waterworks Public Private Partnership, with over 30 private businesses specialised in fields such as consulting, water quality management or water supply-related materials and devices, which collaborate with the city government to explore potential overseas projects (SWA, 2016). The public–private partnerships in foreign cities envisage different degrees of collaboration, from feasibility study and design to infrastructure development.

Seoul’s entrepreneurship falls within the national-scale decision in 2010 to promote the overseas expansion of the water industry. As the commodification of water is opening up a ‘blue-gold’ industry with a 6.5% annual growth rate, Korea aims to increase its 2.1% share of the global water market (SWA, 2015: 180). As Seoul’s reputation in water governance attracts several actors from developing countries, public–private partnerships, which are often required for the participation in water-related project tenders, are set up in order to enter into foreign markets, and offer expertise and technology, particularly for a country such as the Republic of Korea where most water infrastructure projects have been completed, and hence there is limited domestic market demand (SWA, 2015). As noted by Pow (2014) with regards to Singapore, another global city which is also constructing its water expertise as a branding model called ‘global hydrohub’ (Joo and Heng, 2017), Seoul is looking beyond its saturated domestic market by exporting its expertise abroad. The convergence of public and private interests is inscribed within the logic of the ‘entrepreneurial state’, where national and local levels of governance cooperate and engage in competitive strategies to boost domestic industries in foreign markets (Eisinger, 1988).

To be clear, Seoul’s policy knowledge transfer towards foreign cities and business interests’ promotion abroad are intermingled. In this sense, the set of local organisations plugging into the global informational infrastructure aim to both promote knowledge on successful urban policies of Seoul and generate economic opportunities for the Korean private sector abroad. The policy boosterism of Seoul’s water management does serve the interests of the local growth machine, but not as a means to legitimate a specific local policy initiative. The promotion of Arisu is rather an example of city branding that aims to travel towards, rather than attract, market opportunities, confirming the inherent translocal dimension of urban assets in a globalised world. As such, it constitutes the construction of Seoul’s water management as a model to plug into the ‘competitive market-place for policies’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010: 170). Nevertheless, Seoul’s reputation in water governance is not confined solely to the enhancement of a public service and the expansion of the market segment that revolves around it.

Clean and safe water as foreign political reputation

As McCann (2013) notices, policy boosterism may also be driven by the demand side’s genuine desire to learn from others’ success and the supply side’s genuine globalist positive-sum will to help other cities by sharing their expertise. Equally important, the author continues, the increasing connectivity among cities should not be interpreted solely as an expression of competitiveness and cooperative ethos, but also as the will to stand out as a leading figure in a specific policy field (McCann, 2013). The promotion of Arisu confirms this supply side globalist solidarity-based approach and allows us to grasp a sophisticated understanding of translocal reputation as a political asset that cities increasingly aim to construct and deploy in the shifting geography of global governance.

With over 180 participants attending the waterworks trainings between 2012 and 2017 (SWA, 2018), the branding of Arisu as clean and safe water is used to attract representatives of foreign cities and share the broad spectrum of experience that Seoul has accumulated in the water sector. Furthermore, the promotion of Seoul’s water management as a city model presents a clear advantage in light of the aspirational resource it embodies: while the modern water supply infrastructure commenced in 1908, the Korean War in the 1950s destroyed most of the facilities, making the ‘real history of water of Seoul’ begin in the 1960s. This allows Seoul to draw a chronological narrative line between the genesis of its own successful experience and the current infrastructural conditions of many cities participating in the training, giving a sense of recent achievement to both the experience and the individuals that made it possible. Beyond the relevance for the localised cases brought up by the participating cities, these learning events gather experts in water-related issues that, mindful of the increasing interdependence that underlies a globalised world, pool knowledge in a platform that aims to improve the overall governance of urban water systems.

The inter-urban policy knowledge transfer on water management intersects with the rising importance that city networks, as networking structures that cities establish as formal organisations devoted to policy-making and learning, have in the changing landscape of global governance (Acuto and Leffel, 2021). City networks, either generalist or thematically specialised in a broad range of policy areas such as climate action, creative cities or maritime governance (e.g. Gordon, 2020; Leffel, 2020; Santos, 2021), are informational infrastructures at the service of their members. As such, the editions of the MITI Sustainable Water Management Training Programme held in Seoul are primarily conceived for the participation of public officials from members of the city network Metropolis, although open to other attendees too. The host further envisions the training session as the beginning of a potentially wider form of support, should the participating city be interested in discussing the implementation of the lessons learnt back home.

Therefore, SMG constructs its expertise on water governance as an element of the variegated practices of development cooperation and international relations among local governments that scholars identify conceptually as decentralised cooperation (e.g. Hafteck, 2003), city-to-city cooperation (e.g. Tjandradewi and Marcotullio, 2009) or municipal international cooperation (e.g. van Ewijk et al., 2015). While water and sanitation traditionally account for a small fraction of development cooperation, as of 2017 this sector constituted 4.6% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) overall flows (OECD Stat, 2017), water and sanitation services gain weight if we take a closer look at the development cooperation relationships at the level of sub-national governments. ⁵ The most remarkable example in our study is Chanchamayo (Peru), where for the first time SMG supported a city from a developing country with its own tap water technologies and materials to improve the local water supply facilities (SWA, 2015). The collaboration began as Jung Heung-won took office at the helm of Chanchamayo, becoming the first elected ethnic Korean mayor in South America in 2011, and requested support from the mayor of Seoul (SWA, 2015), demonstrating the importance of cultural (but also geographical) interlinkages in the process of formal establishment of translocal relations. The funding for the Chanchamayo water supply project came from a specific cooperation and emergency relief fund established by SMG under the name Seoul ODA (i.e. Official Development Assistance) concerned with water and other major policy sectors of Seoul (Seoul Solution, n.d.), in clear connection with the state-based international development aid architecture composed by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC).

It is therefore clear that international solidarity is a prominent driver of the promotion of Seoul’s water governance. For instance, SMG supports the accommodation expenses of participants in the water management training programme hosted by Metropolis, in addition to supporting the training cost. Cities interested in participating in learning events around Seoul’s water governance are often Seoul’s sister cities. After each programme, the participating cities share their feedback and an action plan that outlines the next steps in the implementation of the lessons learnt from Seoul’s water system back home.

At the same time, this proactive role in knowledge sharing and cooperation is embedded into the wider shifting of the role of cities in the global arena. SMG is actively engaged in solidarity-based activities in a city network like Metropolis that, as a formal organisation, embraces the call for cooperation and solidarity among cities as a foundational element of its mission. This is because, in addition to their role as informational infrastructures, city networks play a key role as collaborative platforms that amplify the legitimacy claims of city governments in national, regional and global governance arrangements that are inherently state-centric. Not only is water an element of the growing contribution of Seoul to development cooperation beyond the traditional prominence of states, but it is also a specific municipal policy field that Seoul deploys to increase its profile within both the transnational city networks and the larger struggle to raise the influence of cities in the changing global governance architecture. Such strategy draws upon the understanding of solidarity as the expression of a broad shared value and, hence, from an instrumental perspective, as a source of legitimacy at the international level (Hurrell, 2005). It is in light of this strategic objective that, besides Metropolis, Seoul is prominently engaged in other global and regional city networks such as ICLEI, ⁶ C40 ⁷ and Citynet. ⁸ Hence, the construction of Arisu as policy boosterism is further geared towards the strategic objective of increasing the international political reputation of Seoul as local government, both among peers, governmental actors and partners.

In conclusion, the entwinement of solidarity- and profit-based drivers lies beneath the assemblage of public and private interests. This blend is openly acknowledged rather than concealed. The company sells its specialist expertise and technology, and ensures a starting point for a business opportunity. At the same time, the cities – both on the demand and supply side – conceive the collaboration as a means to improve the quality of life of their citizens. The linkage between the local and global scale is tight. Whereas the self-legitimation strategy to increase public preference for municipal tap water targets solely the local community and does not constitute an exportable water policy model per se, it intersects with the political and commercial drivers of the international promotion of Seoul’s water management as a policy model. Their seamless correspondence is not only because SMG is the central actor behind each of these endeavours. It is also because these initiatives resort to the same sources of local and translocal legitimacy, be it the local performance of Seoul’s water management policy, the accreditation by a global specialist institution or the reference to a broad shared value such as solidarity.

Heterogeneous local elites and the politicisation of water

As noticed in relationship to the dynamism of Seoul within several city networks, the legitimacy conferred by the transnational promotion of Arisu transcends the water sector and contributes to the overall political objective of rising internationally as a city. The reputation-based strategy of policy knowledge transfer and market expansion revolves around a solid local government–business relationship. Yet the city’s global reputation in water governance intersects and is further amplified by initiatives undertaken by other local and national societal actors such as the 2016–2020 Water Mid-Term Strategy of the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) or the training modules on water management organised by the International School of Urban Sciences of the University of Seoul. Through these separate yet converging initiatives, individuals, students and workers connect with the urban fabric of Seoul in order to acquire knowledge and skills on sustainable urban development and infrastructure management.

Moreover, the promotion of Seoul’s water governance confirms the mutual constitution of the local and the global (Massey, 2005). The material resources of the campaign, in Korean and translated into foreign languages, aim unequivocally to increase the public preference for tap water by Seoulites. By the same token, the presence of an Arisu PR booth at the Shanghai Expo 2010 aimed to place this brand within a global audience (SWA, n.d.-b), which is a typical feature of these showcasing platforms, but simultaneously to ‘speak back’ to its local constituency about the recognition received abroad (McCann, 2013: 14).

Transnational city networks play a key role at the intersection between the mutual constitution of the local and the global, and the translocal sources of legitimacy. Sub-national governments participating in the policy knowledge transfer and decentralised cooperation initiatives validate the ‘authority’ of Seoul in the field of water governance as a model of urban development. This reputation travels across the multiple formal and informal exchanges hosted by global and regional city networks. Jointly with many other areas of expertise and cooperation, it further contributes to raising the profile of SMG within the transnational city networks, as well as in the variegated landscape of the global governance institutions. A source of legitimacy such as solidarity is mobilised as a key political asset in the attempt to stand out as a leading global city through a logic that incorporates both cooperative and competitive drivers. This improved perception can further reinforce the ongoing self-legitimation efforts carried out by the city government within its local constituency and, in this case, increase the public preference for municipal tap water. In this sense, the burgeoning phenomenon of transnational city networks further amplifies the complexity and scope of initiatives of policy boosterism. As James and Verrest (2015: 72) remind us: ‘networking tends to use relationships as means to other ends’.

Yet this case of policy boosterism does not aim to protect the private sector interests of local growth machine rentiers, but is actually a branding strategy to increase the citizens’ trust in the public service provision against the effects of the bottled water industry. In this sense, the image of Arisu bottles being offered to media stars during press conferences, for instance, responds to the attempt by SMG to place its municipal brand against the corporate competitors in the bottled water industry. The promotion of Arisu tap water as a brand resonates with the wider shift within the public administration whereby municipalities embrace marketing tactics that are the bread and butter of the business world (Zavattaro, 2013). Yet the divergence of objectives with the business sector unearths a more specific insight. The global bottled water industry is dominated by ‘multinational corporations with a stake in commodifying local resources, but also local governments who abdicate their responsibility towards citizens’ (Pacheco-Vega, 2019: 6). In a country where bottled water sales have increased annually by 11% and where the most popular bottled water is 961–2155 times more expensive than tap water (Lee et al., 2018), this case of policy boosterism may also be interpreted as an example of local agency that seeks to counter unsustainable patterns in terms of social inequality and environmental degradation.

Such observation should not be read as a paradox. City branding constitutes a governance strategy inscribed within larger patterns of inter-urban competition, which are simultaneously constructed and contested by a variety of urban actors, within the understanding of the international political agency of cities as pluralist rather than unitary actors (Bassens et al., 2019). Within the heterogeneous composition of local elites, municipal leadership and resources may tilt the internationalisation towards urban policy-making processes that envision reputation beyond the narrow understanding of corporate actors and elite-led growth coalitions. Within the concert of public and private interests that underpins the shift from a government to a governance model, local governments are deeply influenced by political value systems while fulfilling their essential role in the pursuit of collective goals (Pierre, 1999).

This leads us to move to the larger scale of the politicisation of water and reflect on the lack of access of water, understood (for most regions of the world) as a social and political construct that reproduces unequal power relations (Swyngedouw, 2013). Within this line, the recognition of the human right to water and sanitation by the United Nations (UN, 2010) should be identified within the attempt to complement the predominant framing of water as an economic good with the social value of water and the call for the right to basic infrastructure services (Bell et al., 2017). Therefore, it is interesting to notice how the UN and other specialised institutions and credentials are deployed as sources of legitimation, while the range of discursive resources offered by the UN on basic service provision of water as a human right are not harnessed in a substantive manner at the local and translocal scale by SMG. In contrast, a specific link is constructed between local water management and global sustainability, as Arisu is acknowledged as a major project among the incorporation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to the city government’s planning (SMG, 2018). Within the two-way relationship that weaves through local and global scale, the case of Seoul illustrates the contemporary discourse on sustainable cities and calls attention to wider questions of social equity, as the intertwining of public and private interests inevitably produces a ‘fragmented landscape’ where the entrepreneurial, competitive and comparable city selectively connects and disconnects with the UN as a source of legitimation (Hodson and Marvin, 2017). This consideration is even more remarkable if we consider Seoul’s recent decision to mainstream human rights norms in municipal policy development and shift from economy-centred development to a people-centred welfare political agenda (Cho, 2019; Lee, 2019). This discursive profile may well be identified within the dialectical tension that unfolds between local progressive policy-making and the global-scale neoliberal agenda of privatisation of public assets.

Conclusion

Urban policy-makers are increasingly active beyond their municipal borders in social practices of legitimation that sway simultaneously between the local and global scale. The article adopts the theoretical framework of policy boosterism in order to illustrate the merits of an interdisciplinary dialogue between the relational and territorial constitution of policy-making in policy mobilities and the understanding of legitimation as a social practice in international studies. The adoption of policy boosterism allows the unveiling of how the extra-local, be it the genuine globalist positive–sum will to help other peers in an urbanising world, the comparison-competition with another global city, the travelling of a water model towards developing foreign markets, or resorting to specialised global expertise or broad shared values such as solidarity as sources of legitimacy, is deeply related with the local. Both the extra-local and local reproduce the frictions and synergies that arise when public and private interests intertwine. SMG is both allowing its local water industry firms to harness the reputational value of the local water governance system in order to sell technology and expertise, and is undertaking its responsibility as a public service provider through a self-legitimation strategy that is at odds with the interests of the global bottled water industry.

The article further notices how sharing valuable knowledge in a context of global-scale scanning of policy solutions is inscribed within the wider ambition of selected cities to raise their profile as political actors of a changing landscape – competitive and cooperative at the same time – where traditional state actors and their international institutions blend with rising non-state actors. With the imperative of climate resilience gaining relevance in urban policy-making, the circulation of urban policy knowledge around water management will acquire further centrality in the coming years (Long and Rice, 2019; Pacheco-Vega, 2021). Knowledge sharing relations such as the ones depicted in this article may be conducive to open trust-based thematic exchanges where both ‘parties learn’. As technology and expertise often require the involvement of corporate actors, particular attention should then be paid to the assemblage of cooperative and competitive drivers, as well as to the underlying power relationships (Mukhtarov et al., 2021). The actual development and outcome of this negotiation process remains an empirical question.