Anxieties of an emerging donor: The Korean development experience and the politics of international development cooperation

Introduction: Awkward engagements

Almost 15 years ago, in her now classic work Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna Tsing (2005) described the challenges of studying global connections at a time when the novelty and coherence of neoliberal globalization had been called into question. After the 9–11 attacks, Tsing (2005: 11) argues,

the story of an inevitable, peaceful transition to global integration has seemed more and more like the dream of a particular historical moment. This is not because the force of global connections has disappeared – but it no longer looks so neat. Ten years ago social analysts were impressed by the size and power of newly emergent global circulations, so they focussed on global coherence, for better or worse. Now it is time to turn attention, instead, to discontinuity and awkward connection, as this proves key to emergent sources of fear and hope.

The loss of confidence in once mainstream narratives of globalization is not isolated to Western Europe and North America. Events in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and beyond have also led to a rethinking of global connections and a renewed search for alternatives to neoliberal or ‘hyper’ globalization narratives of economic development (Behuria, 2018; Kozul-Wright and Fortunato, 2015; Salazar-Xirinachs et al., 2014). While it is now ebbing, the pink tide in Latin America hastened the search for progressive alternatives to neoliberal policy advice, as has the rise of various development-oriented political leaders in Africa whom have embraced the idea of building ‘democratic developmental states’ (Edigheji, 2010; Hart, 2014; Wilson and Bayón, 2017). Meanwhile, developing economies in Southeast Asia from Vietnam to Myanmar have sought to emulate the development experiences of their predominantly Northeast Asian trading partners. For their part, emerging donors in the field of international development assistance and South–South cooperation such as China, South Korea, Brazil, and Russia have been content, even eager, to supply policy narratives in support of this quest for new narratives of development and globalization (Fourie, 2017; Mawdsley, 2012; Roett and Paz, 2016). As Mawdsley et al. (2017: 2173) point out, the development cooperation and knowledge sharing initiatives between these countries make frequent recourse to a performative register of empathetic expression, one that emphasizes shared feelings of pain, warmth, solidarity, justice, and mutual benefit. This register allows new donors to forge connections and, by asserting their shared experience as ‘developing’ nations, to portray their expertise as directly relevant to recipient countries, explicitly reject hierarchical relations and insist on mutual benefit through cooperation (Mawdsley, 2012: 152).

To better understand some of these new connections and circulations, this article explores the development cooperation narratives of one emerging donor in particular: the case of South Korea (hereafter Korea). It responds to Tsing’s provocative call for a focus on awkward and messy connections in two ways. Firstly, it extends her focus to the field of development cooperation in general, and to the narrative of Korean development in particular, for it is a narrative that has been used to disrupt the coherence of neoliberal prescriptions for development. Korean policymakers consciously adopt the language of development alternatives in their cooperation efforts. As Korea’s flagship policy sharing initiative, the Knowledge Sharing Program (KSP), puts it, the Korean experience provides hands-on alternative to ‘theory-oriented policy recommendations from advanced countries’, a veiled critique of mainstream policy advice based on neoliberal orthodoxy (Korea Development Institute – KDI, 2014: 7). Secondly, the article extends Tsing’s focus beyond the loss of the coherence of optimistic narratives of neoliberal globalization to question the coherence of those experiences portrayed as an alternative to it. It does so by attending to the mixed emotions that accompany, but are often abstracted away from, the discussion of economic models, pursuing a closer look at the anxieties that shape specific efforts to construct and circulate development experience narratives and afflict those tasked with sharing them. In other words, it shows how new connections and flows in development cooperation and knowledge sharing also create anxious and awkward engagements.

Research on the social construction of emerging donors’ identities and their heightened language of affect has largely focused to date on the empathetic claims made by political leaders and through ritualized performances such as high-level meetings, speeches, and declarations (Mawdsley et al., 2017). This article seeks, in part, to shift the focus on the emotional dimensions of emerging donors from the more empathetic discourses and rituals of political leaders to the more uncertain emotions experienced by practitioners tasked with shaping and sharing policy narratives of national development experiences. Through interviews with Korean development practitioners tasked with crafting policy narratives of the Korean development experience and prescriptions for developing countries based upon it, and interrogation of policy narratives they circulate, this article records a register of anxiety and ambivalence. This register is particularly noticeable when examining how development practitioners understand the competing pressures they face in designing, implementing and evaluating cooperation policies, but it is also present in the unspoken elements that shape the development policy narratives they create and share. While anxiety may be said to influence the development industry in general, in the specific context of Korea’s knowledge sharing initiatives as an emerging donor, this anxiety that informs it has been produced through a triple set of pressures for Korean development practitioners to export a version of its experience as an alternative development model, extend the overseas activities of domestic businesses and state agencies, and entertain the ambitions of ruling political blocs. I argue that these pressures shape both what is spoken and unspoken in policy sharing documents, as well as the subjective feelings and reflections of practitioners about the policies and programs that they share and administer.

To explore this anxiety, this article draws upon research into Korea’s KSP: the program that has been tasked with summarizing or ‘modularizing’ Korea’s development experience and promoting it as a series of interchangeable policy lessons for developing countries. The narratives the KSP circulates seek to encapsulate Korea’s development history – the interpretation of which remains strongly tied to political leadership and hegemony-making projects – and shape the form and content of official development assistance (ODA) programs. In these regards, Korea’s development cooperation resembles other emerging donors – countries that have relatively new or revived aid programs – who have sought to both harmonize their aid with other OECD DAC donors (of which Korea is the first major former recipient country to join) but also to differentiate their brand of development assistance from them based on their own unique experiences of development (Chun et al., 2010; Kim and Kim, 2014). ¹ The analysis that follows involved a close reading of policy sharing and consultation documents produced by the KSP, and related materials, and interviews with development practitioners. The close reading focuses, in particular, on KSP narratives that make claims as to the ‘alternative’ nature of Korea’s model. These include policy studies of institutions associated with Korea’s developmental state model (e.g. documents dealing with macro-economic planning, industrial policy, and financial resources), for this model has in part generated demand for Korea’s development cooperation (Kim and Kim, 2014). It also examines KSP policy narratives and cognate documents related to Korea’s New Village Movement (Saemaul Undong, hereafter Saemaul), an authoritarian-era rural development program from the 1970s launched by dictator Park Chung Hee, father of recently impeached and imprisoned President Park Geun-hye. Conservative governments have long championed the developmentalist legacy of Park Sr, and his daughter’s administration used Saemaul to brand Korea’s fledgling development assistance programs as a values-based ‘alternative’ path to development (see Doucette and Muller, 2016 for a discussion on the relation between the KSP and Saemaul-branded assistance).

This close reading was interwoven with over 25 interviews with development practitioners, experts, and critics undertaken between 2015 and 2019, with the majority during the Park administration. To maintain confidentiality and anonymity where requested, I have not identified my informants by their official titles and agencies in this article. However, informants for this study have included officials and other participants ranging from elite positions working under the auspices of the Prime Minister, elite, and high ranking officials from state research institutes, right on down to mid-level bureaucrats, consultants, researchers, analysts, and evaluators at both ODA supervising ministries and executing agencies in charge of drafting and assessing the KSP documents and cognate knowledge sharing initiatives, as well as NGO staff that implement, monitor, and/or critique Korea’s ODA policies at home and abroad, and independent researchers who been contracted to author specific KSP documents. ² The KSP itself is perhaps unique among KSPs in the manner in which it stretches across scale to integrate such a wide number of actors and institutions.

The remainder of the article is organized as follows. The next section briefly reviews how contemporary work by development geographers has looked at questions of anxiety and awkward engagement in relation to contemporary development policies and, in particular, to East Asian development experiences. The section that follows surveys some of the forces that have promoted the latter as an alternative development model over the last two decades and notes how the ambivalence and ambiguity that surrounds this experience finds its way into KSP documents. The following sections examine the anxieties of practitioners who have been tasked with shaping and sharing these narratives, and the ODA projects they inform in the context of two successive conservative administrations that sought to use its development assistance policies, and Saemaul in particular, to celebrate Korea’s development and promote its experience as a unique brand of development assistance. I then conclude with some notes on how further research into awkward engagement can assist critical approaches to emerging donors’ development cooperation.

Anxiety and economic development

Recent work in human geography and beyond has foregrounded the anxious and ambivalent emotions that accompany development, planning, and diplomatic interventions (McConnell, 2017; Silvey, 2009; Westin, 2016), including the East Asian developmental state (Sioh, 2010a), the ‘neurotic neoliberalism’ of Jeffrey Sach’s Millennium Villages Project and the ‘biosocialism’ of Rafael Correa (Wilson and Bayón, 2017). For instance, Wilson (2014) argues that ‘neoliberalism should be interpreted as an anxiety-ridden form of crisis management that is constantly attempting to cover over the gaps and ruptures in its own ideological fabric caused by the contradictions that it is structured to conceal’. Silvey (2009) makes a cognate point about how anxiety and ambivalence are often used to authorize cognate development interventions, while Westin (2016) situates anxiety as constitutive of the very profession of planning as such. Economic ideas here are always more than their content, and indeed can be interpreted as passionate responses to contradictory geopolitical and economic processes, which in the case of neoliberalism they have often aided and abetted. Moreover, this work details how the anxieties attached to economic ideas are spatialized through various means, from the internal topology of the psyche (super ego) to discursive representations of space, and material processes of urbanization including infrastructure, demonstration cities, utopian experiments at the village level, and other site-based events and performances.

While much of the literature on anxiety and economic planning has focused on neoliberal interventions, there is an emerging literature on the anxieties that follow models often portrayed as an alternative to them. For instance, Maureen Sioh (2010a) advocates an approach that foregrounds the anxieties and assumptions (the ‘not-said’) that underpin and influence policy decisions surrounding East Asian development experiences. To ignore the role of anxiety and abjection as a driver behind policy-making, Sioh argues, ‘is to dismiss an immense emotional force beyond the reach of any economic calculus’ (Sioh, 2010a: 593). Sioh places the Asian Values debates of the late 1990s into the context of Malaysia’s decisions to ignore International Monetary Fund (IMF) advice during the Asian financial crisis. She argues that the ‘tactical essentialisms’ implied by Asian Values – the idea that Asians value community, social harmony, order, and stability over the individual and personal freedom, and exercise thrift, hard work, and loyalty to the family (see Barr, 2000 for a discussion) – and the concept of the developmental state – the idea that East Asian capitalism has been guided by nationally insulated, meritocratic, economic planning elites who have used their expertise and strong networks with business to produce rapid development in a way that free markets could not – allowed economic success to be rationalized by Southeast Asian politicians as a result of cultural values that provided the antidote to the abjection of colonial exploitation (Sioh, 2010a: 586). In other words, more than a description of reality, or mere dogma, the idea of a developmental state and/or Asian Values became the locus of elite aspirations to be accorded equality and respect in the international hierarchy (Sioh, 2010a: 583). It became a moral performance about economic success and its recognition within an international order suffused with racialized, geopolitical anxieties. Watanabe (2018) also notes an ‘instrumental culturalism’ among Asian emerging donors’ efforts to create a strong identity for themselves, one that seeks to essentialize and naturalize otherness not simply out of a respect for difference but in a fashion that colludes with particular political interests in their transnational encounters: in other words, as an ideological effect. Drawing upon postcolonial theories of mimicry (see Kapoor, 2008 for a fuller discussion), Kim and Garland (2019) argue in a similar vein that Korea’s repetitive narration of its own unique cultural and historical ‘mindset’ as a ‘solution’ for developing countries mask its own economic ambitions and anxieties as it tries to position itself between OECD DAC and South–South development cooperation.

These authors’ comments on cultural performance of various ‘models’ of East Asian development are pertinent to the approach taken in this article. They point out that there are important emotional and geopolitical dimensions to economic policy and the models upon which it is based (on the latter, see Glassman, 2018; Meulbroek and Akhter, 2019). This has been a subterranean theme in the literature on East Asian development for some time despite its often anti-cognitive understanding of rationality. For instance, Wade (1996) pointed out long ago that the recognition of East Asian success in the World Bank’s (1993) East Asian Miracle report was very much a political act of ‘paradigm maintenance’ that sought to both recognize the interventionist state but, at the same time, avoid direct criticism of neoliberal orthodoxy. The document itself seems anxious and ambivalent in how it regards East Asian development as both an outcome of state interventions that ‘resulted in higher and more equal growth than otherwise would have occurred’ (World Bank, 1993: 6, as cited in Chang, 2009: 12–13; see also Evans, 1995: 39) and a neoliberal success story of global market integration, economic liberalization and macroeconomic stability. Wade argues that the ambivalence that animates the report is both an outcome of East Asia’s political economic transformation (the economic ‘miracle’ itself) and the struggle for recognition it created among various and competing constituents in the World Bank such as Japanese bureaucrats and neoliberal economists.

These struggles have only continued to shape the debate about the state and economic development and, by extension, position Korea’s history as an exemplar of the East Asian developmental state model for some and a neoliberal success story for others. For instance, the pervasive criticism of the Washington Consensus over the last 20 years in particular has put the spotlight on Korea and generated demand for knowledge of its development experience, especially for countries seeking to embrace strong state intervention and promote industrial policies associated with East Asian growth (Childs and Hearn, 2017; De Waal, 2013; Kim, 2017). But for others, the IMF’s endorsement of Korea as a successful case of trade liberalization makes it a model worth emulating. Moreover, Korea’s development experience is discussed in its own knowledge sharing initiatives in a similarly ambivalent manner: appearing at times as an outcome of market-led reforms and at other times the result of an interventionist state. To borrow another useful idea from Tsing (2005: xi), the meaning of Korean development occupies a zone of awkward engagement. Tsing uses the phrase to denote the fact that words mean something different across a divide even as people agree to speak. However, it is quite useful for also describing narratives of Korean development in as much as that experience remains open to divergent, even parallax interpretations between recipient and donor, but also, in a conflicted manner, within a single narrative itself.

Since the early 2000s, in particular, demand for knowledge about the Korean development experience has rapidly grown, beginning with the embrace of the developmental state as a potential model for African countries in the early 2000s (Edigheji, 2010; Mkandawire, 2001; Samatar, 1999). More recently, this initiative has been supported by international organizations and Korea’s own knowledge sharing efforts through co-sponsored research by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) that includes some of the original theorists of the Korean developmental state – notably Peter Evans and Alice Amsden (Yi and Mkandawire, 2014). In addition, Korea has sought to accord prestige to its development experience through sponsoring initiatives by the United Nations, World Food Programme, OECD, and other international organizations that use the Korean case as an inspiration for developing countries seeking to localize their development strategies and implement the Millennium Development Goals, and now the Sustainable Development Goals. Further afield, Korea’s development experience has also been promoted by development studies scholars and practitioners who favor strong industrial or ‘productive sector policy’ to promote the integration of developing economies into global value chains (Chang and Andreoni, 2016; Kaplinsky and Morris, 2016; UNCTAD, 2015). At the same time, Korea has looked to its development assistance policies to expand the overseas networks of its businesses, promote its status as a prominent middle power country, and find new sources of diplomatic support (Karim, 2018; Kim and Grey, 2016; Watson, 2014).

Through programs such as the KSP, Korea has sought to assert control over the narration of its development experience and the prescriptions it might provide for countries seeking to learn from it. The KSP first began in 2004 by offering bilateral consultation and knowledge exchange at the request of a few initial partners. After the inauguration of President Lee Myung-bak – a proud promoter of Korea’s Cold War history of rapid, state-led development – the KSP rapidly expanded. It dramatically increased the number of partner countries it engages in consultation with and has scaled up policy promotion efforts to the multilateral level. In 2011, the KSP launched its Modularization of the Korean Development Experience program with the aim of providing a range of master policy narratives for its policy consultation, knowledge sharing activities, and ODA. The KSP has since published around 150 modularization studies (now called context studies) of the Korean development experience that are used as primary reference material for hundreds more policy consultation documents that shape the design and implementation of development cooperation programs at both the bilateral and multilateral level (see http://www.ksp.go.kr for a list of KSP publications).

Strategic ambiguity?

Within the KSP, there is a constitutive tension between exporting a Korea’s development experience as an alternative model and extending the expertise of actors associated with Korea’s developmental state (cf. Kalinowski and Park, 2016). The KSP is controlled by elite institutions from the era of rapid development such as the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the KDI – two parts of the former Economic Planning Board (EPB), the pilot industrial planning agency praised by developmental state theorists. Moreover, KDI’s most recent president was Kim Joon-kyung, son of late dictator Park Chung-hee’s Chief Presidential Secretary, economic technocrat, and confidante, Kim Chung-yum. Kim Sr’s autobiographical and self-congratulatory monograph of Korea’s development (Kim, 2011), commissioned and published by KDI, is also frequently cited in KSP materials. Nonetheless, the KSP’s narratives of economic development seem ambivalent, even ambiguous, about the role of the state in economic development. As discussed below, they recognize Korea’s status as a developmental state and provide knowledge about the institutions associated with that model and also claim the Korean model as an ‘alternative’ to traditional development models. But the prescriptive content of what that alternative is remains obscure. Likewise, in interviews, elite bureaucrats and government researchers whom have shaped the direction of the KSP express caution in how they refer to Korea’s development. They regard it as a ‘hands-on’ model that can be a source of policy alternatives but shy away from a trenchant critique of market-based approaches to development.

Even the KSP narratives that cover what might considered the core institutions of the developmental state depart from strong prescriptions found in the developmental state literature, opting instead for an affirmation of market-led growth. There is little discussion of how elite bureaucracies pursued industrial policy in the manner described by developmental state theorists, who emphasize how the Korean government used financial repression (e.g. nationalization of banks, liquidation of the ‘curb’ financial market, and funneling of discounted loans to export-oriented firms). For instance, in Han’s (2014: 121) KSP study of the EPB, Korea is described as ‘fundamentally a market economy system and therefore the planning and controlling is limited’. ‘Even during the high growth period in which economic planning was actively carried out’, Han continues, ‘Korea followed free market principles and used the planning function mostly for solving the problems on the supply side’. Han (2014: 119) instructs his readers that when introducing the functions and roles of Korea’s EPB to other developing economies, Korean development experts should inform them of the ‘adverse effects of planning and provide advice that enables them to depend more on a market economy’. Instead of a shared developmentalist ideology, the coherence of the bureaucracy is explained simply by an underlying, self-essentializing cultural ethos, similar to that discussed above. ‘Korea is fundamentally rooted in Confucian tradition. Some characteristics of Confucian culture include educational fervor, loyalty, self-control, diligence and hard work, and a self-sacrificing spirit for one’s organization or country’ (Han, 2014: 120).

This cultural and value-based explanation concerning Korea’s developmentalist institutions can especially be seen under the conservative administrations of Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013–2017). From 2008 and expanding rapidly after the 2012 election of Park – the daughter of former dictator Park Chung-hee – Korea vigorously promoted Korea’s authoritarian-era rural mobilization program, the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement, Saemaul for short), as the meta-narrative or ‘brand’ of its development experience (cf. Kim and Kang, 2015; Schwak, 2016). Aided by conservative civil society organizations (Jeong, 2017), Korean ODA initiatives argued that Saemaul represents both an effective ‘rural community development model’ (KOICA, 2015) – and hence a solution for urban–rural inequality – for developing countries in the form of small-scale technical improvements (e.g. through high yield grains, greenhouse technology, and irrigation) and, more importantly, a general software (mindset) for developmental success (Economic Development Cooperation Fund (EDCF), 2014). Because of its emphasis on behavior change, Saemaul was even promoted as a model for the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Korean government sponsored international initiatives such as the UNDP’s Saemaul Initiative Towards Inclusive and Sustainable New Communities to that effect.

Positioned alongside these initiatives as the authoritative source for knowledge on Saemaul, the KSP emphasized it not as a contested project of state-led, authoritarian mobilization, but, rather, as a bottom-up movement based on the principles of self-help, diligence, and cooperation: a narrative that downplays the role of the state intervention in the actual movement (through price subsidies, land reform, and coercion) and that posits development as the result of a mental shift in the attitude and values of the poor themselves. For example, in his KSP study of Saemaul governance, Jin-Kwang So (2013: 548) praises Saemaul for overcoming Western experience of development (and modernization and dependency theory) by targeting the community or village scale and activating the community spirit. As Doucette and Muller (2016) describe in their study of how the Saemaul narrative has been transformed from one of strong state intervention to a largely spiritual one, the idea that Saemaul was a grassroots, voluntary, self-help movement based on the renewed spirit of the rural community is an ideological representation that depoliticizes the actual experience of rural modernization in Korea. It neglects the manner in which Saemaul was used to territorialize state power through a nation-wide program of village enumeration, ranking, and competition for resources and by mobilizing and regimenting farmers in a performance of nationalist, anti-communist subjectivity, similar in many ways to Malaysia’s own New Villages as described by Sioh (2010b). Moreover, the Western and Weberian influences upon Saemaul were direct: both the dictator Park Chung-hee and his advisors (Choi Mun-hwan and Hwang San-duk) admired Weber’s protestant ethic and wanted to recreate it in the Korean context (Han, 2016, 134; Han SM, 2004: 74). For them, Saemaul was one way in which to do so, an act of mimicry rather than alterity.

Despite the fact that the promotion of Saemaul as a development cooperation strategy involves significant historical elision, by embracing a script of it as Korea’s unique spirit of development, Korean ODA can be seen as embracing a distinct set of cultural values that, in ways, contrasts with the hyper-individualism of free market orthodoxy and praises national identity. But this spatial performance of the Korean ‘spirit of development’ is not the same as the promotion of a model of development that is an alternative to neoliberalism in the manner that proponents of the developmental state understand it to be: i.e. in terms of industrial policy and state intervention such as price support and nation-wide mobilization. The ambiguous descriptions of the model being shared thus resonates with what Hetherington (2009) has called ‘strategic incoherence.’ Hetherington (2009: 659) initially used the term to describe the language of the World Bank’s World Development Report and notes that after facing decades of critique, the Bank ‘has turned the very word development into a place-holder for any and all liberal projects for improving the third world which do not openly contradict the central tenets of global capitalism’. Hetherington notes that this ‘cuddly language’ combined with increased mediation of the Bank’s policies through the participation of multiple actors, from companies to NGOs, allows the bank to devolve responsibility for its failures. The same might be said of Korea’s narratives of development. Ambiguity about what exactly the ‘alternative’ nature of Korea’s experience is, and reduction of its meaning to a cultural mindset shields practitioners from having to make strong prescriptions that explicitly work against the advice of traditional donors who favor market-led development, or against Korean businesses that might also disapprove of market-distorting policies that emulate Korea’s own experience.

Anxiety in practice

While ambiguity and ambivalence appear as a strategic feature of the discourse of KSP documents – one that has been produced by pressures that affect the demand for and supply of expertise on the Korean development experience – this register also extends down to the everyday subjective feelings of those tasked with producing and sharing such narratives. This has been particularly the case with Saemaul-branded ODA initiatives mentioned above, but this celebratory and ambiguous framing of development narratives is not unique to Park’s administration and its associated project of recuperating her father’s legacy. Her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, also strongly associated Korea’s development cooperation policies with his administration’s slogan of ‘green growth’ (Hwang et al., 2017; Tonami and Müller, 2014) and other pro-growth narratives. Meanwhile, Park’s liberal successor, Moon Jae-in – who was elected following historic protests that led to Park’s impeachment – has strongly emphasized his administration’s ‘people-centered’ ODA strategy whilst also enlisting Korean firms to support his New Southern Policy of combined aid and investment in Southeast Asia. Anxieties concerning how to delimit, present, and evaluate a unique Korean ‘model’ of development, one strongly tied to political leadership and elite-led institutions, will continue to animate Korea’s development cooperation, not to mention other emerging donors with similar institutional histories.

As Proudfoot (2015) argues, geographical analysis can be enriched by studying the anxieties that inhere in fieldwork in both the researcher and the researched. During research, I was surprised by the persistence of anxiety, ambivalence, awkwardness, skepticism, and doubt about the self-referential nature of the KSP and the development cooperation it influences, particularly in the context of the late Park administration. Anxiety in this context, however, should not be considered as an existential form of distress, but, rather, a more or less mundane form of uncertainty among professionals about the tasks of representation with which they had been assigned. Perhaps in part because they were accustomed to the strong influence of political leadership upon ODA policies, many of the informants did not necessarily see the policies that they were tasked with sharing as distinctly abnormal. Nonetheless, for some informants, anxiety about the KSP and related Saemaul-branded programs in particular took the form of voicing upfront reservations about what they felt was its overly politicized nature under the Park Geun-hye administration, which, at the time of research was beginning to be engulfed in various scandals that ultimately lead to her impeachment. Several practitioners and critics I interviewed pointed out that policies that had nothing to do with rural modernization and urban–rural disparities were rebranded under the slogan of Saemaul ODA. ‘Everything is advertised as Saemaul, [so] it is quite hard for the outsiders to distinguish which is actually truly begun as Saemaul or is rebranded as Saemaul’ (Interview, Seoul, June 2015).

For others, including ardent promoters of the program, there was still an underlying unease about what Korea’s status as an ‘alternative’ might be, especially in regard to the degree to which Saemaul should interpreted in light of the SDGs. In general, informants were concerned about the limits of constructing a model based on Korea’s development experience, and sensitive about the degree to which it might depart from mainstream or, for some, progressive prescriptions. In interviews, anxiety about how to represent Korea as an alternative to neoliberalism in the form of an interventionist state did not take the form of worries about the absence of the strong prescriptions found in the academic literature. Rather, the reservations concerned the authoritarian context of that model, one that is often elided in the very literature on the developmental state in favor of an ideal type focus on the ‘rationality’ of economic bureaucracies (Doucette, 2017). ³ On this topic, I was surprised how most informants were quite forthright and relaxed about their reservations, though some were defensive. The former tended to relate their criticisms to personal experience and/or educational and professional experience in other sectors – such as academia and civil society – and locations. For example, in the words of one mid-level official involved with the KSP:

I attended college during the early 1980’s and at the time I was a sceptic because all my peers were fighting against the government. When I began [working on projects about Saemaul], I was a sceptic and I remain one until today. (Interview, Seoul, June 2016)

Another way in which practitioners expressed anxiety over how to model an authoritarian-era development program as an ‘alternative’ path to development was expressed in terms of the differences in context, size, and scale between Park Chung-hee’s original rural modernization efforts, and the micro-level development cooperation project it now shapes. They noted that the national scale of Saemaul as a cartographic project – one that enumerated rural villages, and then ranked and mobilized them in competition with one another – is impossible in many country contexts given the amount of state intervention required.

So you look at the dynamics and we speak of 30,000 plus natural villages, the natural units of communal life in Korea and I guess for the first time in the Korean history, all of those villages were assessed and were recorded a status ranking…. On a national scale there was a first ever experience and I think there is a very interesting possibility in that scheme in and of itself, they have played a very important role in galvanising the efforts of the community members to do something together. (Interview, mid-level official involved in KSP, Seoul, June 2016)

The politics of modeling

These concerns about modeling development speak to a wider issue of how contextual factors affect the ability of policies to be transferred and implemented both at the site of origin and of delivery. The Saemaul movement was itself part of a larger authoritarian policy context and did not necessarily lead to the higher rural incomes that are associated with it on its own. Consultants and officials involved in the KSP expressed reservations about how development assistance programs attempted to draw clean boundaries around it that make it seem like a coherent model by itself.

Saemaul is a rural development, agricultural development programme, but still, yeah, the reason why it was successful, is that there was industrial policy too, and the wages, for example, of urban labourers [were high], everything was connected together, not just Saemaul itself. It is more like a policy environment. It is quite critical [for developing countries] to implement or adopt a model for their country, not just Saemaul Undong itself. (Interview, Seoul, June 2015)

Some practitioners who endorse Saemaul ODA and help implement its programs overseas are keenly aware of the lack of interventionist prescriptions yet anxiously affirm Saemaul’s voluntaristic, self-help narrative as at least starting point. As one practitioner puts it: ‘I have many debates with the structuralist view of development. My answer [to them] is: I understand that you are right but shall we wait until those structure problems are solved?’

I know the Philippines suffered much under this inequality and also the World Bank and UNDP they recognise this problem but it’s quite difficult to touch those internal structure problems… There are houses located here and around the house garden we are doing this one [project] but the main farm is belonging to the landlord. So, well, this structure we can’t do anything because most of the product there belongs to the landlord. Yet we are doing the small garden project with the local farmer because we found that if you grow real crops and moringa and chicken in small garden you can buy medicine and also you can send your children to school. (Interview, Seongnam, June 2015)

The ability of KSP consultants to effectively translate Korean development experience into the recipient’s contexts was also questioned. Some informants noted that KSP consultants have excellent experience compiling what Korea has done before in terms of their general description of policies, but demonstrated a ‘resistance to understanding’ the local context due to a narcissistic obsession with Korea’s own development experience (see also Han, 2015). They complained that many Saemaul consultants did not really take factors such as the local land tenure system, local village system, or inter-scalar governance system (local-center, local-regional) into account. Questions such as whether or not the recipient context allows for a more top-down process or a more empowering, bottom-up process were often overlooked in the modular package offered by the KSP. Because it is based on modularizing Korea’s own development policies, consultants tended to spend minimal time in the field and embrace fairly standardized prescriptions (Interview, Seoul, June 2016). On this matter, some interviewees felt that the success of the KSP depends upon the consultants’ ability to understand the local context. Both mid- and high-level officials involved in the KSP that I interviewed complained about the difficulty in finding consultants trained in recipient country contexts. Since the KSP is about sharing the Korean experience, they noted that it tended to hire Korean consultants. This creates a problem of consultants who need to be trained in the area of development cooperation and recipient country contexts.

Compounding this problem is the fact that Korea’s development experience itself is highly contentious and difficult to precisely define. One official noted that it is difficult for consultants to ‘consent to each other’s idea about what was the Korean experience’. ‘I think one of the mistakes we often make in Korea is this is not the fixed experience we are talking about’ (Interview, Seoul, May 2015). As another official involved in the KSP remarked in one of my interviews: ‘We learned that even the Korean experience, we haven’t compiled it until we say, okay, we need to share it in a cohesive form called policy consultation, then we’d better define what it is’ (Interview, Seoul, March 2016). Anxiety over how to delimit the experience, and evaluate programs based on it, was a frequent topic of discussion, even those practitioners who felt there was some coherence to the Korean development experience that made it a model worth sharing. Beyond the questions of suitability for local context discussed above, the manner in which specific policies were shared based on recipient demand (a key feature of many emerging donors’ cooperation policies) made it difficult to transfer institutional complementarities where they existed. This leads to a grab bag approach to knowledge sharing in which narratives are sundered from their contexts and placed together as a package.

Reticence about the quality of narratives being shared is further compounded by frustration at the fragmentation of the very institutions that control Korea’s development assistance policies. The elite Ministry of Economy and Finance (MOEF) controls the concessionary loans administered by the EDCF and tends to promote narratives of development that can serve strategic economic activities by Korea firms (e.g. promotion of large-scale infrastructure projects). Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade controls grant aid administered by KOICA, whose projects are more discursively aligned with traditional donor discourses such as the SDGs. Meanwhile, through the KSP, which is organized under the auspices of the MOEF, the KDI and other elite institutes write or commission the master policy narratives and consultations that in turn affect what forms of assistance are requested from recipient countries. At minimum there are four different voices shaping assistance policies, if one only includes the main agencies, each with their own narrative preferences which the KSP seeks to reconcile. It is in part because of this fragmentation that many practitioners I spoke to expressed an underlying desire to reform Korea’s ODA policies in a manner that might decenter the power of and rivalries between elite bureaucracies in shaping policy narratives and cooperation projects.

The business of sharing

As Sung-Mi Kim (2016) has noted, both Saemaul Aid and South Korean development aid in general has been shaped by competing strategies and dilemmas between a desire to assert intellectual leadership and another to enact ethical/deferential leadership (which Kim also calls ‘strategic followership’). In a nutshell, Kim charts out how some practitioners feel that Korea should capitalize of its association with rapid, East Asian development to carve out a unique but potentially chauvinistic identity for its development assistance, while others feels that aid should accord more with humanitarian and international norms. These tensions animate the bureaucracies that administer Korean ODA and loosely conform to the age cohorts described above with older, conservative bureaucrats adhering to a more pro-business position and younger officials, most often educated in development studies programs abroad, adhering more closely to global norms and normative ideas about aid. Crudely put, older officials see development cooperation as an attempt to support Korean business, while others prefer clearly principled forms of assistance based on normative principles. These twin pressures, to help extend the overseas activities of Korean business and assist developing countries, are written into the self-description of the KSP activities of some participating organizations. For instance, some of the agencies involved in KSP directly state that the program ‘provides consultation for growth and development in developing countries and seeks overseas business opportunities for Korean businesses’. ⁴ In interviews, KSP participants at a variety of state agencies noted that the program was for them an opportunity to search out new projects and opportunities internationally. One official raised doubts about whose capacity is being built by the project: that of recipients, as intended, or of consultants from donor countries?

Professional anxieties about using ODA to extend business ran both ways in my interviews. Some practitioners were anxious about ODA bolstering business opportunities and capacity, while others felt anxious about too many normative commitments. The latter is particularly the case in the area of urban and energy infrastructure projects, consultations around which are often tied to larger scale projects funded through concessionary loans and directed by Korean construction firms. For instance, the KSP’s bilateral consultation on hydropower infrastructure in Southeast Asia goes so far as to outline the design of financial vehicles necessary to fund such projects and involve Korean contractors. Some of the senior officials and consultants I interviewed that were in favor of using ODA to expand business opportunities even questioned the need for writing down the Korean model.

I think that KSP is more valuable as a tool for oral communication and exchange of ideas rather than a publication. I think when you do publish it has a lot of constraints and it should be diplomatic. But by exchanging ideas verbally, orally, between the people who are experienced, who are knowledgeable, and who want to hear about that experience, I think it’s more valuable. (Interview, Seoul, June 2016)

Conclusion

While emerging donors have made empathetic claims about the reciprocal nature of their development cooperation, and the need to avoid a rhetoric of superiority that often animates North–South relations, the register of awkwardness, ambivalence and anxiety explored in this article can help show that there are important questions to be raised about the degree of mutual recognition shared between development partners involved in cooperation, much less the inclusive, alternative, and democratic nature of specific assistance projects (Cornelissen, 2009; Mawdsley, 2012: 129). It highlights that while official narratives of development may be coded in a discursive register of equality, empathy, and mutual recognition, the narratives of many practitioners and critics seem, in contrast, animated by anxiety about the appropriateness of the model being shared. As explored above, the discourse of the KSP and the feelings of the practitioners who participate in it can be seen as both produced by but also productive of anxiety. On the one hand, the ambivalent representation of Korea’s development experience appears as a strategy for dealing with anxiety caused by both the failures of neoliberalism that makes Korea’s expertise desirable to developing countries of various political persuasions, and a desire to not rock the boat when it comes to the prescriptions associated with traditional donors and languages of development such as the SDGs. It is in this content that the cultural script of a spirit or developmental ‘mindset’ allows the KSP to claim ground as an ‘alternative’ but also to divest itself of responsibility for any strong political prescriptions. It is an ‘alternative’ (Saemaul) that allows particular ‘norms’ (e.g. the SDGs) to be localized. On the other hand, we might also see this strategy as producing anxiety through fears about how to even model, or evaluate it, in a context shaped by strong political imperatives to brand ODA strategy, and fragmented, elite-led institutions that seek to use aid to pursue business opportunities and accord prestige on ruling politicians.

Viewed up close, the Korean development experience begins to seem less of an alternative model of development and more like a zone of awkward engagement. But, of course, the same might be said about many different models of development: from neoliberal orthodoxy to SDGs and other more technical interventions elsewhere. There is always an anxiety that accompanies planning that creates questions for practitioners about the appropriateness of a model being shared, or that raises questions about how such models may seek to promote elite interests, or gloss over structural contradictions, and so on. What is unique about the Korean context, and by extension that of many emerging donors, is the manner in which their models have been so closely based on self-representation of national histories, and portrayed as alternative to mainstream advice. As Kim and Garland (2019) argue, this narcissistic focus can obstruct the creation of a more egalitarian platform for development cooperation at the multilateral level, one that might facilitate a more horizontal exchange of lessons between recipients and donors. It is perhaps in this spirit that following the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye the new Moon administration began to rebrand Korea’s ODA strategy as one that is ‘people-centered’ with senior officials discussing how Korea’s cooperation can better learn from its own histories of democratization as well as democratic efforts elsewhere. While it is beyond the scope of the present paper to explore this issue in greater depth, it seems at present that the various pressures discussed in this article will continue to influence Korea’s development cooperation. For instance, the Moon administration’s joint targeting of aid and investment toward Southeast Asia through its New Southern Policy, and cognate efforts to emphasize Korea’s prowess in Smart City construction, indicates that pressure to expand the activities of Korean firms, and find a narrative to do so, remains strong. Moreover, economic ministries remain instrumental in constructing these cooperation narratives despite greater consultation with NGOs about the nature of Korea’s aid strategy. Korea’s ODA policies seem certain to encounter future awkward engagements that attention to the register of anxiety and ambivalence highlighted in this article can help scholars to explore.