Exporting the Saemaul spirit: South Korea's Knowledge Sharing Program and the 'rendering technical' of Korean development

Jamie Doucette, Geography, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, MI3 9PL

jamie.doucette@manchester.ac.uk0161 275 5502

Anders Riel Müller, Nordic Institute of Asian Studiesanders.muller@gmail.com

Abstract

This article provides a critical intervention into South Korea’s recent effort to promote its 1970s authoritarian-era rural modernization program, Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), as the ‘iconic’ model of its international development assistance. To better understand how this movement has been represented, this article examines the policy narratives that have been produced by the Korean government’s Knowledge Sharing Program (KSP) and circulated through multiple development cooperation initiatives. These narratives portray Saemaul as the key to Korea’s developmental success: a mental revolution in values that inculcated the ‘can-do’ spirit in poor rural villagers and allowed them to escape poverty and stagnation. We argue that the emphasis of this narrative on the spiritual, voluntary, and value-oriented nature of the movement has been used to ‘render technical’ Korea’s development experience: i.e. to reduce it to a question of how development experts successfully cultivated the spirit of development in the Korean people and, by extension, how developing countries might do the same. We show how this narrative neglects the contested history and Cold War context of Saemaul, raising questions about the ‘brand’ of development assistance that has been built upon it.

1. Introduction

While scholars of the East Asian development state have long considered Korea to be a

paradigmatic model of rapid, export-oriented development, the Korean government’s

promotion of its development experience as a policy model worth emulating is a

relatively new and understudied phenomenon (Aboubacar, 2013; Han, 2011; 2015; Kim

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and Kang, 2015).1 Korea is one of the newest members of -- and first former-aid recipient

to join -- the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), of which it became a

member of in 2010. As the new kid on the block, Korea has sought distinguish its

development assistance from other countries. It advertises its approach as an “evidence-

based” model, one that has been built through hands-on learning and that provides an

alternative to the "theory-oriented policy recommendations from advanced countries"

(Korea Development Institute, 2014: 7). At the heart of this effort lies the Knowledge

Sharing Program (KSP): a program launched in 2011 and run under the auspices of the

powerful Ministry of Strategy and Finance (MOSF), Korea Development Institute (KDI),

and Export-Import Bank of Korea that has been designed to offer “a deeper and wider

understanding of Korea’s development experience with the hope that Korea’s past can

offer lessons for developing countries in search of sustainable and broad-based

development" (Preface by KDI President Oh-Seok Hyun, in Han, 2012: 4). To do so, the

KSP is tasked with three main activities: the ‘modularization’ of the Korean development

experience to make it accessible for a foreign audience and to “put forth accurate analysis

and policy alternatives based on [it]” (Kim and Tcha, 2012: 6), bilateral consultation with

partner countries, and multilateral consultation with international organizations. These

three activities are intimately linked: the modularization studies – policy narratives that

summarize various policies considered integral to Korea’s development experience –

supply significant content and context for the policy consultation studies, and these often

shape the concessionary loan and grant aid projects that are administered by various state

1 Prior to 2008, it was actors external to the Korean state that did much of the promotion of the Korean development experience as an alternative development model, with an emphasis on constructing developmental states in Africa (see, for instance, Mkandawire, 2001; Samatar, 1999; Yi and Mkandawire, 2014; Edigheji 2010).

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agencies and organizations.2 In short, the KSP marks an ambitious attempt to render

Korean economic history into a legible narrative of development, and one that is used to

shape and support Korea’s official development assistance (ODA).

What is unique about both the KSP and Korea’s wider ODA policies is that they

are explicitly organized around promoting Korea’s development experience as a coherent

model of development. To serve as the “iconic” and “representative model” (KOICA,

2015) for this approach – the part that sums up the Korean development experience and

describes what kind of lesson it offers for the developing world – Korea has recently

begun to aggressively promote one particular set of policies from its development

experience: the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement3), an authoritarian-era rural

modernization program from the 1970s launched by the late dictator Park Chung-hee, the

father of current President Park Geun-hye. While the promotion of Saemaul as the meta-

narrative for Korea’s development assistance began under the current Park Geun-hye

administration, it is likely to continue beyond it in one form or another.4 For instance, the

United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) newly launched Saemaul Initiative

Towards Inclusive and Sustainable New Communities’ (ISNC) project is set to run till the

end of 2017. The ISNC involves using Saemaul’s principles of “diligence, self help, and

cooperation” (KOICA, 2015: 11) to promote the localization of the UN’s Sustainable

Development Goals. The Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and other 2 Almost all KSP publications are available online at www.ksp.go.kr The policy topics included range from reforestation to the operation of Korea’s nodal economic planning ministry, the Economic Planning Board.3 Saemaul Undong (hereafter Saemaul) is sometimes translated as New Community Movement.4 While Park has promoted Saemaul as Korea’s unique brand of international development assistance, the KSP’s modularization of the movement’s policies and government support for Saemaul as a model for developing countries preceded her administration. Park’s predecessor, President Lee Myung-bak, expanded the promotion of Saemaul, but nonetheless branded his development cooperation under the banner of Green Growth (Tonami and Muller, 2013). In Korea, there is a tendency for each incoming President to ‘rebrand’ development cooperation -- a feature shared by other emergent donors – but there is also some continuity in the type of policies there are promoted based on the political orientation of the ruling party and the lifecycle of the various international projects promoted by each administration.

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state agencies and organizations have also been rapidly expanding model rural villages,

leadership training, and other rural development initiatives under the banner of Global

Saemaul: an effort designed to promote Saemaul as Korea’s “exemplary” model of

development assistance and as an effective “global community development model”

(KOICA, 2015: 11; KOICA, 2014).

Because the globalization of knowledge about Saemaul has been built, in part, on

the information provided by the KSP and Korean state agencies, their narrative of this

movement deserves greater scrutiny: the task of the current article. Saemaul started as a

rural infrastructure self-improvement program in the winter of 1972. The program’s

initial improvements in road construction and irrigation infrastructure were well-received

by farmers, leading the Park Chung-hee regime to expand it into a national movement

emphasizing farmer’s ‘mental revolution,’ an anticommunist revolution that, by

extension, would shore up rural political support for Park. Work groups and village

committees were formed and competition within and between villages encouraged;

consequently, a host of other mobilization activities were rolled out from group singing

and calisthenics, to national rallies. While the government branded the movement as one

of ‘self-help, diligence, and cooperation,’ Saemaul was animated by an extension of state

power into rural communities through the aggressive application of green revolution

technologies, strict performance monitoring, and farm mechanization. These policies

created passionate attachment to Park’s military regime (in part due to massive rice price

subsidies which quintupled farmer’s income) for some; however, for others the

movement was remembered as highly coercive and controversial. By the late 1970s the

movement had lost its momentum and the new rice varieties it introduced were hit by

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crop failure. In the 1980s, Saemaul became mired in corruption scandals, and the ruling

military regime now led by General Chun Do-hwan faced growing farmer protest.

Despite its contentious history, Saemaul has been promoted by the KSP as the key

to Korea’s developmental success. Saemaul is described as a mental revolution in values

that inculcated the spirit of self-help in poor rural villagers and allowed them to escape

poverty and stagnation: the software of the Korean development story. Kap-jin Chung’s

(2013) KSP study on the movement, for instance, credits Saemaul with inculcating the

Korean population with this ‘can-do’ spirit of development. Citing Max Weber, whose

influence on Park Chung-hee’s ideas Saemaul movement has been noted elsewhere (Han,

2004), Chung notes that “ideological change is the main cause for the success of

modernization,” and that “the basis of modern industrial society in Western countries was

rationality that was from Protestant’s labor and economic morality.” Chung points out

that for Weber, however, the capitalist value rationality was best typified by the ascetic

Protestantism popular in 18th and 19th century America, which provided an ideal-type

‘spirit’ or ‘mentality’ that valorized savings and accumulation and provided a disciplined

work ethic. But Korean development was not the result of the Protestant ethic, Chung

argues, but was achieved with the collective spirit of Saemaul through which “people

embraced science, rationalism, technology and pragmatism which in turn contributed to

social reform toward proactive developmentalism” (Chung, 2013: 631). Saemaul restored

the “community spirit” and developed the “spontaneity of villagers” that were “afraid of

change and challenge of the spirit” (Chung, 2013: 722).

This value-oriented narrative of spiritual rejuvenation and self-help is not unique

to Chung’s KSP contribution, but is one that pervades the KSP studies on Saemaul and

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the grant aid projects that it helps to design and administer at multiple scales. The

numerous model rural development projects in villages across the Global South run by

KOICA include education in the principles of Saemaul and leadership training sessions

by Saemaul veterans. KOICA’s President and former aide to Park Geun-hye, Kim

Young-mok, has argued that Saemaul’s focus on behavioural change “has many

applications, not only for rural development programs, but also for overall national

development strategy” (Kim quoted in Asia Foundation, 2015): a view that is

commensurate with the World Bank’s (2015) recent focus on mind, society, and

behaviour.5 At the local and regional level, there are also multiple Saemaul training

programs for foreign visitors operated within South Korea by a variety of organizations

and universities: Yeungnam University’s aptly named Park Chung-hee School of

Saemaul and Policy among them. Korea has also provided funding to various multilateral

initiatives as vehicles for sharing the Saemaul spirit, such as the UN’s Millennial Villages

Program (KOICA, 2014b), the World Food Organization’s Zero Hunger Program, and,

most recently, the UNDP’s INSC program as briefly described above (see Figure 1). It

has also pursued greater international recognition of the movement from the UNESCO

archives, the OECD, and by high level officials of Korean nationality such as UN

Secretary General Ban-ki Moon (Korea Saemaul Undong Center, 2007) and World Bank

President Jin-young Kim. Finally, Saemaul’s spiritual narrative also extends beyond these

state-led efforts to the proselytizing development narratives of Korean evangelical

missions in Africa and elsewhere (Han, 2011; 2015).

INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE

To better understand how the Saemaul movement has been represented in Korea’s

5 We thank our reviewers for drawing this connection to our attention.

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development assistance policies, this article examines the policy narratives that have been

produced by the KSP and circulated through these multiple initiatives.6 In what follows,

we argue that the KSP’s spiritual, voluntary, and value-oriented Saemaul narrative has

been used to help ‘render technical’ Korea’s development experience: i.e. to reduce it to a

question of how development experts successfully cultivated the spirit of development in

the Korean people and, by extension, how developing countries might do the same. Here

we draw upon Tania Li’s (2007) concept of ‘rendering technical’ to examine how the

KSP renders complex and contested Korean development experiences into a series of

elite-driven, technical interventions, a move that allows it to travel within international

policy circuits as a distinct ‘model.’ Such ‘rendering technical’ also fulfills an ideological

role in Korean politics by revising the historical record to make its development

experience seem grassroots and consensual while according international prestige to the

expertise of Korean planners and politicians past and present.7 In other words, the process

of modularizing and promoting Korean development combines both governmental and

hegemonic functions: it describes a set of developmental problems and their solutions,

while also providing a narrative that benefits certain contemporary political forces and

excludes others.

Korea’s Saemaul ODA provides an interesting case of rendering technical

inasmuch as the narrative it promotes diagnoses the problem of development not simply

6 Not only does the KSP set out the authoritative interpretation, its study authors have been intimately involved in administering the policy programs based upon them and in supporting the governments wider Saemaul ODA programs.7 There is a distinct politics of scale here in as much as the conservative governments of Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-back have been adept at using international development cooperation to create support for domestic policies that have been highly controversial, such as Saemaul and ‘Green Growth’. Meanwhile, the revision of Korea’s development and democratization in a manner that glorifies past dictatorships has been an ongoing project of these governments and their allies in what is called the ‘New Right’. See Doucette and Koo (2016) for a discussion.

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as lack of proper technical inputs or the individual will to improve but as the lack of a

collective spirit of development. Its expertise is thus not simply oriented towards

delineating a field for physical intervention in the rural landscape, but also in cultivating

collective subjects with the ‘can-do’ spirit: i.e. in targeting their collective emotions,

behaviors, and beliefs. To do so, it promotes a narrative of the rural peasantry as lacking

in motivation and of the state as providing a people-centered, voluntary, and democratic

pathway to development. Rendering technical in this case involves, as Li describes, the

practice of making problems and solutions visible and intelligible: identifying lack of

spirit, instructing the people by example, and performing small improvements to farm

infrastructure and cultivation techniques. As we seek to show in this article, however, it

also involves the simultaneous rendering invisible of those elements that would

complicate the problems identified in the policy narratives and that are not easily

governed by experts and bureaucrats: such as the wider structural and institutional

context of Korean development during the Cold War, and the social struggles and

(geo)political conflicts that animated it. Such a focus would contradict the message of

rural stagnation and democratic development promoted in Saemaul ODA as the KSP

narrative stands in sharp contrast to the contested historical experiences of the movement,

not to mention ongoing academic and political debates over the geopolitical background,

economic effects, and methods of implementation that have defined its legacy (Boyer and

Ahn, 1993; Han, 2004; Oh, 2014; Park and Han, 1999). This context is omitted in the

KSP in favor of a simplified narrative that emphasizes the voluntary participation of the

rural population in a state-initiated movement that inculcated them with the 'can-do spirit'

of development and thus raises important questions about what kind of model is being

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shared by Saemaul ODA.

This article is organized as follows. In the next section we discuss our use of Li's

concept of “rendering technical” in greater detail. We build upon Li’s concept by

showing not only how development projects attempt to render a complex social process

into a set of technical solutions, but also how such practices simultaneously involve the

strategic revision, or rendering invisible, of historical-geographical experiences in order

to make visible the rectifiable “problems” that these solutions propose to solve. The

sections that follow then look more carefully at the economic imaginaries (Sum and

Jessop, 2014) of Saemaul promoted by the KSP. We examine the problematic

representation of the movement as primarily oriented towards poverty alleviation through

leading by example, mental transformation, and voluntary mobilization, and show how

such a reading neglects the wider experiences of Korean rural development, including its

coercive and conflictual politics. Here we foreground the Cold War, anti-communist

context of economic developmentalism in South Korea, particularly the aspects of this

era that are neglected in KSP documents. We then conclude with a discussion of how the

KSP's rendition of Korean development points to the need for continued critical

interrogation of that experience.

2. Rendering technical: Expertise and ‘anti-politics’

In the sections that follow we draw on Tanya Murray Li’s (2007) concept of the

‘rendering technical’ of development: a concept in which she combines the insights of

Foucault and Gramsci in order to study development projects as outcomes of both diffuse

forms of power relations and wider political-ideological struggles. The concept was

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inspired by James Ferguson’s (1990) classic study of the Thaba-Tseka Development

Project (an agricultural modernization project that took place between 1975 and 1984 in

Lesotho). Drawing heavily on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, both Li and

Ferguson argue that experts more often than not seek to render the process of

development into a technical or apolitical process by simplifying complex political-

economic relations into intelligible fields for intervention (Li, 2007: 7). Issues such as

poverty and inequality become framed as technical problems of growth and participation:

problems that can be resolved by those same experts who possess the desired technical

solutions and who can thus select the ‘correct’ institutional or material inputs. What do

they mean by technical solutions? According to Ferguson, this means reducing complex

social and political situations to a matter of bureaucratic, technological and organizational

interventions. In particular, Ferguson sees in the “…hegemonic problematic of

‘development’…the principal means through which the question of poverty is de-

politicized today” (Ferguson, 1994: 256). Yet, even though development is rendered

technical or anti-political, its practice remains inherently normative in the sense that it is

considered to create 'improvements' to a social and physical landscape that has been

found lacking by experts (whose power is rarely scrutinized) in charge of identifying the

“problem” and devising the desired “solutions”. Development projects thus remain

political in the sense that their interventions embolden the power of elite and expert

actors over the development process by strategically employing particular kinds of expert

knowledge and policy narratives to exclude other social forces and secure hegemony.

Building on Ferguson, Li argues that two key practices are involved in devising

improvement or development projects. The first is the practice of problematization, or

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identification and bounding of the deficiencies to be rectified by the expert. This

identification of a problem is intimately linked to the availability of a solution (Li, 2007:

7; cf. Bacchi, 2009; Winders, 2009: 39). This second aspect of devising development

interventions is the practice of “rendering technical.” Adapting a phrase from Rose

(1999), Li describes ‘rendering technical’ as a

“…shorthand for what is actually a whole set of practices concerned with representing "the domain to be governed as an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics ... defining boundaries, rendering that within them visible, assembling information about that which is included and devising techniques to mobilize the forces and entities thus revealed.” (Rose, 1999: 33 as cited in Li, 2007: 7).

However, as both Ferguson’s study of the Thaba-Tseka project and Li’s study of

development projects in the Central Sulawesi Highlands of Indonesia reveal, the effect of

this encounter between technical development interventions and local conditions is that

development projects rarely proceed as intended, and most never reach their stated

objective(s). Instead, such projects generate side effects such as the development of new

social conflicts, the expansion of bureaucratic state power (Ferguson, 1994: 254-255),

and the proliferation of the (trans)national development apparatus8 (Li, 2007: 15). The

latter is an outcome that Li contends should not be regarded as merely an unintended side

effect: instead, she entertains the possibility that such effects are “calculated by those

very experts who produced the ‘development’ plans” (Li, 2007: 287).

Li’s conception of rendering technical involves making problems and solutions

visible and intelligible, but we would like to emphasize that the practice simultaneously

8 Li draws on David Ludden’s (1992) definition of a particular “institutionalized configuration of power” shared by late colonial and postcolonial states defined by David Ludden as a "development regime". A development regime that are defined by (1) ruling powers that claim progress as a goal, (2) a "people" whose conditions must be improved, (3) an ideology of science that proffers principles and techniques to effect and measure progress, and (4) self-declared, enlightened leaders who would use state power for development and compete for power with claims of their ability to effect progress. (Li, 2007: 15-16).

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actively renders invisible those elements that are not easily governed by experts and

bureaucrats: such as the social struggles and conflicts that shaped the (Korean)

development experience. This is what Li refers to as the political-economic relations

outside the reach of the intervention (Li, 2007: 4). Rendering technical thus involves not

only the identification of the problem and its proposed solution, but also the conscious or

unconscious practice of delimiting the development experience to those aspects that are

within the boundaries of the expert to remedy: a practice that more often than not leaves

hegemonic relations of power and domination untouched. Therefore, from our

perspective, to understand how development interventions are rendered technical we need

to also focus on the contexts that are being excluded from the narrative. We find that such

a focus is particularly important in the case of the KSP's narratives of the Korean

development experience that more often than not obscure the anti-communist, Cold War

context of that experience and promote a narrative of developmental 'success' on the basis

of an idealized representation of what were in effect highly contested and controversial

policies.

In the sections that follow, we focus on three documents published under the aegis

of the KSP and the Korea Development Institute between 2011 and 2013 because they

provide the foundation for the government’s attempt to make Saemaul South Korea’s

representative model of development. The first document is the memoir of Kim Chung-

yum (2011), Park Chung-hee’s former Chief of Staff from 1968-1979. Kim’s memoir is

used as source material for many of the KSP studies and his son has directly overseen the

KSP project as President of the KDI. We also examine two major studies of Saemaul

conducted under the KSP by Han Do-hyun, Professor at the Academy of Korean Studies

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(2012a) and a multi-author volume of modularized studies on Saemaul (Korea

Development Institute, 2013). The latter is a magnum opus of 972 pages involving

contributions from academics, KDI staff, and members of the Korean Saemaul Undong

Center (KSUC).9 Together these documents seek to provide a coherent and authoritative

account of Saemaul movement that is long on description and short on analysis. The

reports document in minute detail how resources like cement, steel pipe, and high yield

grains were distributed, village competitions organized, and Saemaul leaders trained. In

other words, they describe agricultural modernization largely as a question of technical

inputs. But buried in these technical narratives is also underlying argument that Saemaul

was instrumental in creating equitable and broad-based growth during the 1970s and thus

that Saemaul was a central pillar of South Korea’s development success. These reports

base their findings predominantly on archival documents and testimonies of former

Saemaul leaders and describe the “problems” of the rural economy, the motivation of the

regime for launching Saemaul, its implementation and long-term effects. At the same

time, they clearly exclude the political-economic relations that made Saemaul a contested

and contentious program. The fact that the program’s economic and political backdrop as

well as its end results are heavily contested and debated is only acknowledged in passing.

In the following sections we discuss both what is rendered visible and rectifiable

as well as what is excluded in the documents by tackling three core claims made in the

policy narratives: 1) the identification of the causes of rural underdevelopment and

poverty in the mindset of the rural population, 2) the proposed solution focused on

9 This volume is very similar in content to the newly released Saemaul Textbook (KSUC, 2016) put out by the KSUC and used in Saemaul training programs. Several KSP Saemaul study authors have written bilateral consulation KSPs that draw on their modularization studies. Some have also participated in setting up KOICA-funded Saemaul villages overseas, along with veterans from the KSUC, who actively participate in these initiatives.

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mobilizing spirit through education and voluntarism and 3) Saemaul’s lasting effects on

South Korea’s development success. To do so, we contrast the KSP’s largely positive

depiction of Saemaul with the more critical assessment of the program within the

academic literature on Saemaul. This literature provides a critical counter-narrative on the

movement that has been left out of the KSP, despite the impressive amount of empirical

material that the KSP reports have otherwise are able to present. Ironically, this was a

problem noted about scholarship on Saemaul as far back as the 1980s when Mick Moore

noted that much of the Korean scholarship on Saemaul was “generally silent or reticent

on the political aspects of Saemaul” despite the rich empirical content of these studies”

(Moore, 1984: 587). Considering the repressive political environment of the 1970s under

the Yushin regime and the first half of the 1980’s under the Chun Do-hwan dictatorship, it

makes sense that the Korean language literature on Saemaul at the time – a literature that

forms the basis of many of the KSP modularization studies – would have little direct

reference to the political nature of Saemaul. Nonetheless, the KSP studies contain

virtually no acknowledgement of the substantive critical academic literature that has been

produced in the years since Saemaul. Some of the KSP studies, such as Jin Kwang-so’s

study of governmental reform and the Saemaul movement, go as far as to dismiss the

critical literature as being prejudiced and biased overlooking the real facts, which in the

authors’ view cannot be denied by the politically biased (Jin, 2013: 539). The textual

approach we take in this article thus marks an attempt to place the celebratory and critical

literatures in tension with one another. This seems to us to be an appropriate

methodology given that it is the celebratory narrative that has been promoted by the KSP.

In addition, our analysis of the silences within the KSP narratives here has also been

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guided by semi-structured interviews with policy elites, KSP authors, intellectuals,

NGOs, and participants involved in shaping Saemaul ODA as part of ongoing research

into Korea’s knowledge sharing and ODA policies.

3. Rural poverty and the malaise of idleness

The identification of the problems the Saemaul movement intended to solve can be seen

in the KSP reports’ discussion of the origins of and motivation for the movement. The

three reports single out the widening urban-rural income gap of the 1960s and resulting

rural poverty as the major motivation. Saemaul was tasked with closing the rural-urban

income gap, a gap whose cause is attributed to dependency, fatalism and lethargy among

the rural population (Chung, 2013: 658). According to the authors, Saemaul could best

tackle the widening rural-urban income gap by changing the mentality of rural farmers in

order to show them how to help themselves. This narrative replicates the assumption

promoted by the original Saemaul movement that rural underdevelopment was caused by

the resistance to change among a complacent peasantry (Hsiao, 1981: 94). As Vincent S.

Brandt noted at the time, the central administration viewed the cause of rural stagnation

as stemming from the “…backward, pleasure-loving attitudes of the Korean Peasantry”

(Brandt, 1979: 153). Likewise, Mick Moore (1984: 580) quotes a speech by Park Chung-

hee in which he proclaimed that Saemaul Undong “…intended to cure the malaise of

idleness and complacency which sprouts in the shade of stability.”

The representation of the rural population as traditional and complacent justified

the instilment within them of an entrepreneurial spirit and desire for modernity. Ferguson

notes a similar frame of reference in World Bank reports on Lesotho during the mid

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1970s. Despite Lesotho’s century long integration into the global economy, the reports

represent it as isolated and stuck in subsistence agriculture (Ferguson, 1990: 194). In a

similar manner, the KSP’s Saemaul narrative neglects how the Korean rural population

had been incorporated into the Japanese imperial agricultural system since the early

1900s, and largely omit decades of political mobilization by farmers against

displacement, and for land reform under both the Japanese and post-war regimes (Pang

and Shin, 2005; Park, 2014). Instead the KSP reiterates and reinforces the narrative of a

complacent rural population stuck in tradition, one that resonates with Japanese theories

of Asian stagnation embraced by Park and his advisors, not to mention the notions of

lagged growth popularized by Cold War era modernization theories at the time. For

example, in the KSP report New Research on Saemaul Undong: Lessons and Insights

from Korea’s Development Experience (Korea Development Institute, 2013) farmers are

represented as spiritually lacking: “During their off-season, Korean farmers were known

to drink heavily and gamble, significantly lowering agricultural productivity” (Kim, J.-

K., Kim, K., 2013, p. 32). The locus of the problem (income gap) was not in uneven

rural-urban effects of the government’s existing development policies, but rather in the

spiritual poverty of the rural population. This sentiment is echoed in the KDI-sponsored

memoir of Park’s former Chief of Staff, Kim Chung-yum, whom Park entrusted with

spearheading agricultural development and export-oriented industrialisation. Kim

describes Korea’s farming and fishing villages as having been “stuck in a state of

dejection and resignation for thousands of years" before the arrival of Park Chung-hee,

who sought to have them break out of the pattern of “Asian stagnation” (Kim, 2011, 258,

187).

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In contrast to such representations of idleness and stagnation, other scholars have

explained the widening rural –urban income gap of the 1960’s on the basis of the

industrial bias of economic development policy, the political ambitions of Park Chung-

hee to secure hegemony and the country’s changing geo-political position within the Cold

War (Boyer & Ahn, 1991; Brandt, 1979; Burmeister, 1987; Han, 2004; Hsiao, 1981).

During Park’s first two periods as President from 1963 to 1970, the regime pursued a

strategy of squeezing the agricultural sector by diverting capital from the agricultural

sector to export-oriented industrial sectors, which supplemented the capital Korea

received from foreign aid and loans to finance its industrialization efforts (Francks,

Boestel, and Kim, 1999; Lie, 1998; Woo, 1991). According to Francks, Boestel and Kim

(1999), the squeezing of agriculture however did not lead to agricultural stagnation as

argued in the KSP. Agricultural production increased by three to five percent during the

1960s mainly due to the agricultural expertise accumulated under Japanese colonial rule

and the completion of land reforms. These growth rates were nonetheless significantly

lower than the seventeen per cent growth rates in manufacturing output during the same

period, which explains the widening income gap (Francks, Boestel, and Kim, 1999: 109).

The fact that rural incomes were significantly outpaced by urban incomes during the

1960s, however, led to rising discontent among the rural population, which had been

President Park’s power base in previous elections (Boyer & Ahn, 1991; Brandt, 1979;

Hsiao, 1981).

The Park regime feared the growing support for opposition candidate Kim Dae-

jung. Kim was particularly popular in the Southwest region, where the agricultural sector

and farmers’ movements were strong. The initiation of price support schemes and launch

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of Saemaul to modernize rural infrastructure the year before the elections were thus

designed to provide the crucial rural support necessary for Park Chung-hee to win a third

term as President in the 1971 election (Boyer and Ahn, 1991; Brandt, 1979; Moore,

1984). When Park Chung Hee disbanded the National Assembly in October 1972 and

introduced his dictatorial, Yushin constitution, Saemaul became a central pillar in his

attempt to both placate and control his rural power base (Park and Han, 1999).

Finally, Park’s rising focus on rural development can also be attributed to the

changing geo-political situation in East Asia signalled by the Nixon doctrine. Under the

Lyndon Johnson administration, Korea had received generous aid and procurement

contacts in return for Korean military engagement in Vietnam (Glassman and Choi,

2014). In contrast, Nixon began cutting military funding but also drastically reduced food

aid. For almost two decades, US food exports in the form of PL480 food supplies had

been a major source of food supply and government revenue in South Korea (Burmeister,

1987; Park, 2013: 329). This shift in U.S. geopolitical orientation prompted the regime to

emphasize national food self-sufficiency. There was a strong incentive to increase

domestic food production through modernization of the agricultural sector as relying on

food imports would divert foreign currency away from the regime’s heavy

industrialization efforts that was considered vital to the nation’s military capacity against

North Korea especially given declining American military support. Saemaul was thus

considered as one leg of Park’s Yushin-era development strategy, with the other being the

Heavy Industrial and Chemical Industrialization program (Sorensen, 2011: 147).

Neither of these broader structural, political and geopolitical circumstances are

given significant analysis or even discussed in KSP reports. Instead, they reiterate the

18

Park regime’s problematization that slow rural modernization was caused by a lack of

“spirit”: a problem to be relieved by the application of Park’s strong will to improve

farmers plight and provide them with the self-discipline they would require to become

modern productive members of the nation. The problem-focus thus conforms to Li’s

argument that the practice of rendering technical focuses more on the (lack of) capacities

of the poor than on the political-economic relations that lead to inequality and

exploitation (Li, 2007: 7).

4. Voluntary spirits of development

By finding the cause of rising urban-rural income disparity in farmer’s ‘lacking’ mental

and spiritual capacity, the KSP and KDI are able to produce a field for intervention that is

intelligible, rectifiable, and seemingly non-political. Saemaul is portrayed as a movement

that merely provided the right incentives. The reports include a prolific amount of detail

on how inputs such as concrete, sand, steel wire and high-yield grains developed by

Korean experts (in collaboration with the U.S Funded International Rice Research

Institute in the Philippines among others) were delivered to Saemaul villages and

distributed to individual farmers. For instance, the monitoring system for cement receipts

and used cement bags – a system designed to prevent hoarding of raw materials – is

described in great detail, as is the content of leadership training programs, village

competitions, singing contests and even group exercise. At the same time, the effects of

pre-existing land reform measures, the government’s vigorous price support measures,

and ongoing social conflicts are glossed over. This omission allows the KSP reports to

reject arguments that Saemaul was the result of centralized planning or a cadre of experts

19

imposing their will on the people. Instead, they represent Saemaul as a voluntary process

in which experts merely led by example, by supplying the population with materials,

motivation, and technical expertise. “What many don’t know, or don’t understand, about

the Saemaul Undong is that it was voluntary” (Kim, J.-K., 2013: 20). What the

government did was merely to provide the necessary incentives to spur the spiritual

revolution needed to “…break away from dependency and fatalism” (Han, 2012: 11). The

rural population was in position to develop themselves, according to the KSP, due to high

literacy rates, a strong sense of local community, and a tradition for organization and

management inherited from a village cooperative tradition and military training of the

male population (Han, 2012; Kim, J.-K., Kim, K., 2013: 24). The key was to “activate”

these endowments for the purpose of self-help by eliciting a can-do spirit among

villagers (Kim, J.-K., Kim, K., 2013: 13). The government merely provided the moral,

motivational and material incentives rural villages needed to “…mobilize participation

and promote cooperation on a national scale by employing an incentive-based approach

of rewarding merit, actions based on the values of cooperation and self-reliance” (Ibid.).

The KSP reports place particular emphasis on the role of Saemaul leaders in

cultivating voluntarism and the can-do spirit among villagers. Saemaul leaders are

positioned as the primary vehicle through which the Saemaul spirit was spread, not

through force, but through leading by example, determination, and devotion. Using the

archives of the Saemaul Leaders Training Institute, Choi Sang-ho’s (2013) KSP

contribution outlines the spartan daily rituals of Saemaul instructors whose role it was to

train villagers, beginning with morning exercise at 530am, followed by grouping singing,

lectures, and group discussions that extended to 11pm. He summarizes spiritual qualities

20

that Saemaul instructors should embody in order to set a proper example for the village

leaders:

1. To have a mission of making new history

2. To realize as a member of task force for fatherlands’ modernization

3. To have established concrete attitude toward country

4. To be armed with Saemaul spirit

5. To be devotional enough to sacrifice himself to preserve others’ integrity

6. To have posture of anti-communism

7. To understand, respect and love farmers

8. To have a sense of historical mission in the 1970’s and pride as instructor

of Saemaul Leaders Training Institute

9. To have posture of preacher to Saemaul as religious leader

10. To have posture of sacrifice service to country breaking out of habitual

routine of general workers (Choi, 2013: 497)

The alignment of these qualities with the authoritarian Park regime’s agenda and its

problem-orientation of lagged development caused by habit and routine are apparent

from the content. And yet, Choi emphases that the advice instructors gave to village

leaders was not coerced but voluntarily accepted in a manner that makes it appear

grassroots: “Instructors did not force certain types of actions or instruct corrections,” he

argues. “They instead showed what they wanted trainees to do. Their intention was

motivation which makes the trainees feel the necessity to change their behaviours

themselves. It was how the instructors were able to fulfill one of their key missions,

21

making Saemaul Spirit a way of life” (Ibid.: 423). Likewise, the KSP’s bilateral

consultations recommend Saemaul leadership training as a tool to gradually convince

farmers to adopt new behaviours, using techniques such as group discussions, songs and

exercise and through targeted technical advice on cultivation practices and improvements

to farm infrastructure.

Kim Chang-yum’s memoir approaches the question of Saemaul’s voluntarism in a

similar manner. He attributes the movement to Park’s benevolent and altruistic nature.

“President Park made sure that the Saemaul Movement was not politicized; instead he

focused his energies to achieving the goal of the movement: improving the welfare of

farmers. After the farmers realized the true aim of the Saemaul Movement, which was the

betterment of their welfare and not the pursuit of a political agenda, it swept the country”

(Kim, 2011: 9). Later in his memoir Kim seeks to attribute to the program an expansion

in democratic participation, whereby the movement is represented as fostering an

environment where “Men and women came to understand and adopt the principles of

democracy and local autonomy, thus, enhancing their rights through the Saemaul

Movement” (ibid.: 239). Such a perspective obscures the contested political climate of

the 1970s and the coercion, and subordination to bureaucratic authority that sources not

included in the KSP reports have documented. These excluded studies highlight a strong

top-down nature of Saemaul political leadership, the encouragement of internal policing,

patriarchal gender relations among community members, and Saemaul officials’ use of

both carrots and sticks to get villagers to “help themselves” (Moore, 1984). It is only by

neglecting this political context that the Saemaul spirit can appear as a question of

providing benevolent spiritual leadership and strategic technical advice.

22

In contrast to this voluntary narrative, Sonn and Gimm (2013) argue that Saemaul

is best represented as an “organizational technology” for producing developmentalist

subjects, in which ‘Saemaul leaders’ played an active disciplinary role, rather than a

voluntary, bottom-up movement (c.f. Moon, 2008). Internal policing of and forced

contributions of capital and labour by villagers and competition between villages were

crucial to Saemaul’s implementation. Testimony by Saemaul veterans noted by Hwang

(2009) reflects this coercive side to the movement: “We would have been considered

rebellious if we had not done our job properly” or “those who did not show up for

meetings were treated worse than commies” (Yu 2001:47 as cited in Hwang 2009, 22).

Hwang (2009, 23 n. 4) also documents how Saemaul utilized ‘traditional’ methods of

discipline such as isolating non-participating villagers from the rest of the community,

levying fines, and inducing competition among different lineage groups. The enormous

pressure to perform was noted by Vincent Brandt who wrote:

“With unrelenting pressure from the top, bureaucratic efforts to achieve the movement's goals were intense. Saemaul Undong became the main focus of all local administrative activity; and thousands of officials from the capital descended on the provinces to inspect, exhort, and direct operations, and -- to some extent --compete with local officials. The initial result was often confusion and bureaucratic overkill, while the astonished villagers struggled to satisfy mounting and sometimes conflicting demands for compliance with various aspects of the overall plan.” (Brandt, 1979: 156)

Larry Burmeister made similar observations about degree of top-down pressure on

farmers. He notes how the Korea’s dense agrobureaucracy was mobilized in support of

the adoption of Tongil rice varietal. “The degree of official cajoling and monitoring was

so intense,” Burmeister observes, “that farmers started to refer to specific rice seedbeds

23

and areas designated for the new variety production as the country magistrate’s plot, the

chief of police’s plot, etc.”

Varied strategies were used to gain compliance. The ORD [Office of Rural Administration] captured the most common method in observation: “In Sinan-gun, Jeonnam-do guidance workers persuaded farmers to plant Tongil under the slogan of ‘Visit Farmers Ten Times.’ Many farmers accepted the recommendation to save the guidance workers’ ‘face’” (Kim 1979:87). More heavy-handed measures were also taken. Government-supplied inputs such as fertilizer were often used to coax compliance. And, in interviews with farmers, confirmation was found of the allegation that, as a last resort, traditional variety seedbeds were physically destroyed by rural guidance workers and other responsible local officials. (Burmeister, 1988: 59).

These observations stand in contrast to the voluntary narrative promoted by the KSP

reports and their observations are supported by other scholars (Boyer & Ahn, 1991;

Moore, 1984). They also resonate with Ferguson’s observations in Lesotho that ensuring

that the goals set out by the central leadership were met resulted in a massive extension of

the state bureaucracy into many aspects of everyday lives of the rural population.

By noting that Saemaul involved an extension of state power we do not seek to

deny that many villagers actively and willingly participated in Saemaul. On the contrary,

the promise of higher income, modern amenities, and a sense of contributing to national

development in a time when North Korea was still ahead industrially were indeed

powerful mobilizing factors. For many, Saemaul represented an important opportunity to

participate in the national development project, and even to help enact the distinction of

the state over society by wilfully applying the targets and practices of government on

their villages. In other words, the state was not merely external to society but enrolled

rural residents into its administration (Li, 2005). However, our point here is that this

should not distract us from the movements’ coercive dynamics or its role as an anti-

24

communist political mobilization strategy that played on the heightened fear of North

Korean aggression.

The question that begs to be asked is whether villagers had the level of autonomy

to determine their own futures as the KSP reports argue was the case. Brandt was not

alone in observing the heavy pressure on villagers and officials to reach centrally set

targets. The complex assessment systems which decided whether a village would be

classified as “underdeveloped”, “developing”, and “developed” put immense pressures

on officials and Saemaul village leaders to “encourage” strong community participation

(Moore, 1984: 588). When “encouragement” was not enough, more hands-on approaches

were also employed by Saemaul officials and leaders. For example, whereas one KSP

report argues that initial resistance to the introduction to new, high-yield rice varieties

was overcome through farmer education (Kim, J.-K., Kim, K., 2013: 21), other scholars

have documented how Saemaul leaders and officials in some cases physically destroyed

rice fields of villagers refusing to grow the new government sanctioned rice varieties as

well as only providing price support funds to those farmers that grew the new crops

(Burmeister, 1987; Moore, 1984). The KSP’s voluntary narrative thus provides a very

selective reading of the literature on Saemaul.

This criticism resonates with the wider debate among critical scholars of Korean

development about the degree to which Saemaul can be seen in a positive light as a

consensual project: a hegemonic developmental coalition between the state and

peasantry. Some scholars have argued that peasants actively consented to the project

because of its egalitarian discourse (Hwang 2009), though many dispute just how much

Saemaul -- and by extension other development projects of the Park Chung-hee regime --

25

can be regarded as popular projects despite the fact that citizens may have passively

consented to them, given the regimented nature of the project (Cho and Kim, 1999;

Hong, 2006; Cho 2000; 2010). Furthermore, as Douglass (2013: 4) points out, such

‘consent’ – in the sense of the passionate attachments displayed by some members of the

movement – would not have been possible without “the cement, steel and agricultural

inputs provided by government, and without the extraordinary government price support

for grain production.” And yet, the more aggressive ‘market-distorting’ policies that were

crucial for Saemaul’s economic ‘success’ tend to receive relatively muted description in

the KSP compared to the emphasis put on spiritual development and self-help. However,

as Douglass argues, “stirring the enthusiasm of rural people alone… would not have been

sufficient to raise rural well-being and incomes” (Douglass, 2013: 4).

5. Saemaul as a lasting positive legacy

The third item of contention within the KSP narratives that we’d like to focus on here

concerns how Saemaul is represented as an unambiguous success that laid the basis for

South Korea’s development trajectory since 1980. One KSP report argues that “these

policy efforts contributed to narrowing the wide income gap that stemmed from Korea’s

rapid industrialization, helping to ensure that the benefits of rapid growth were broad-

based” (Kim, J.-K., Kim, K., 2013: 16). The effects on income did indeed last for several

years and the material improvements to rural infrastructure cannot be disregarded. Within

a decade the landscape of the countryside was transformed. Concrete homes with

modern, blue metal roofs, new irrigation systems, electrification, roads and mechanized

agricultural machines spread rapidly. Agricultural extension services, access to credit,

26

and generous price support mechanisms all contributed to rises in income and

improvement in living conditions for rural households during the 1970s. However, the

economic redistribution and growth in agricultural output of the 1970s did not lead to a

sustained balanced growth trajectory.

The movement’s rural momentum ended with a series of bad harvests that

exposed the vulnerability of the new rice variety promoted by the Office of Rural

Development. The 1978 harvest of the by now ubiquitous Tongil hybrid rice variety,

pushed so hard on farmers by Saemaul leaders and agricultural extension services, fell

victim to rice blast and cold weather (Francks, Boesteel, and Kim, 1999: 149). This was

only two years after Park Chung-hee had celebrated the first year of rice self-sufficiency

in the post-war era. It signalled the end of the success of Saemaul as well as the relative

prosperity farmers had enjoyed for a few years due mainly to the price support policy,

which could not be sustained due to significant strain on government budgets (S.-M. Han,

2004). Saemaul’s heyday was decidedly the early to mid-1970s. Brandt’s article from

1979 still talked about the potential for continued success of Saemaul in improving

people’s lives (Brandt 1979), but by the time Mick Moore’s article was published in

1984, he reported that rural disillusionment with Saemaul had become widespread

(Moore, 1984). Poor harvests continued in 1979 and 1980 leading to economic distress

for many farmers who had become more dependent on external commercial inputs such

as machinery and chemical inputs leading to rising indebtedness when harvests failed.

The economic pressure on farmers was further exacerbated when rising imports of beef

led to a sharp drop in domestic cattle prices in 1984 further increasing farm household

27

indebtedness (Boyer and Ahn, 1991; Burmeister, 1992). The economic gains of the early

period of Saemaul were not sustained.10

After Park Chung-hee’s assassination in 1979, the Saemaul movement not only

lost its ideological and economic momentum, but the organization itself degenerated into

the personal fiefdom of Chun Kyung Hwan, the brother of Park Chung Hee’s successor,

Chun Do Hwan. Rampant corruption in the Saemaul organization led to Chun Kyung

Hwan’s arrest in 1988 as he was accused of embezzlement and influence peddling during

his leadership. He received a seven-year prison sentence and a 5.9 million dollar fine for

fraud and embezzlement. Eleven other Saemaul top leaders were also found guilty and

received prison sentences (Chira, 1988; Jameson, 1988).

Both KSP reports argue that positive spillover effects, such as higher levels of

education, the building of social capital, and grassroots democratic-based decision

making proliferated. That Saemaul could have been an oasis of democratic participation

and bottom-up decision-making in the political context of Park’s dictatorial Yushin

regime seems quite unlikely given the political climate and the reach of state power

during the 1970s (Lie, 1998: 112–118). If Saemaul was an exemplary model for

grassroots based democracy, then why did farmers join the emerging anti-state farmers’

movements in the mid 1970s? Some in the leadership of these anti-state farmers

movements such as the Catholic Farmers Union were in fact former Saemaul leaders who

turned to these movements to oppose the regime (Han, 2004: 76). The non-state aligned

movements saw their political support accelerate in the wake of the agricultural crises of

the late 1970s and early 1980s (Abelmann 1995; 1996) and increasingly aligned with the 10 Boyer and Ahn directly argues against the notion that rural income increased in the 1970’s and argue that when looking at the household level, average rural income actually declined during the 1970s due to rising rural indebtedness and that in fact compared to average urban household income rural households were worse off in 1980 than in 1963 (Boyer and Ahn, 1991: 68–84).

28

urban based pro-democracy student and labour movements. These urban-rural alliances

became central to the 1980s democracy movement, which eventually led to free elections

in 1987. And yet, the rise of anti-authoritarian farmers’ movements as a response to

Saemaul is entirely ignored by the KSP reports. The question of why farmers would join

pro-democracy and anti-state movements if Saemaul was already an exemplary

grassroots movement is never asked. Thus, the long-term positive spill-over effects of

Saemaul such as higher education, reduction of the rural-urban income gap and

grassroots democracy are claims that need to be critically scrutinized given the fact that

Saemaul’s inability to sustain rural income growth and its top-down control have been

cited as key reasons why Saemaul’s momentum died almost as quickly as it had risen to

prominence.

6. Conclusion

As we’ve discussed in this article, the narratives of Korean development exported by the

KSP reiterate a familiar, hegemonic script about Korean development that positions the

rural population as idle, stagnant and in need of the will to improve: the 'can-do' spirit of

capitalist modernization. Such narratives neglect the contested context of Korea’s Cold

War-era development policies and are invested in downplaying social conflict. By

promoting international recognition for the positive ‘outcomes’ (rural modernization,

rising incomes) of Park’s policies, the KSP has allowed the Korean government to confer

legitimacy on a highly contentious set of rural development policies and, by extension, a

contemporary ruling bloc that draws its lineage from Park’s authoritarian regime. By

showing how the Saemaul narrative as presented in the KSP studies “renders technical” a

complex and ambiguous development experience into one that is considered

29

unambiguously successful, democratic and central to Korea’s economic success, we hope

that this article fosters useful debate about the content and context of Korea’s knowledge

sharing practices and involvement in rural development projects abroad. While there are

many lessons to be learned from the Korean development experience – particularly, in

our opinion, from the experiences of the social movements that contested it – the KSP’s

narrative of voluntary, spiritual transformation and strategic, supply-side government

incentives belies the complex historical experiences of Saemaul and thus casts doubt on

its applicability as an alternative, grassroots, or democratic development model.

By eliding its contested history, the KSP’s voluntary narrative of the movement

facilitates its rendering technical, enabling the Korean government’s attempt to transfer

the Saemaul 'spirit' to its ODA partners as the secret to Korea’s developmental success

and as a market-friendly solution for development in countries seemingly lacking its

values of self-help and cooperation. For instance, in his contribution to a bilateral KSP

study prepared for the government of Columbia, Kim Won-ho (2013: 123) notes that

“Those regions with various racial background, diverse cultures and value systems, and social gaps have not sufficiently mobilized and strategically utilized their resources to create new economic activities and enterprises, develop technologies, increase productivity and income, introduce modern agricultural methodologies, and so on.” (Kim, W.-H., 2013: 123).

The solution to the problem of resource underutilization, Kim prescribes, would be for

the Columbian government to apply lessons from the Korean Saemaul Leaders Training,

which he depicts as “a spiritual education, social enlightenment education, and lifetime

education to escape from the poverty-ridden dilemma of the 1960s” (ibid.). Such an

approach will allow Columbia to reach a “turning point in cultivating necessary human

resources for local economic development by learning lessons from the Korean

30

experiences, and enhancing knowledge-sharing with Korea, its Asian strategic partner”

(ibid). Likewise, in Kim Kyung-ryang’s (2012: 117) KSP recommendations for

Myanmar, he argues that “it is necessary to reform the mind-set of the agricultural and

rural society” as a “pre-condition for agricultural and rural development” for which

Saemaul is an “appropriate lesson.” In both these consultative documents, it is the

mentality of the farmer that is the problem and Saemaul the answer; its spiritual focus is

the glue that will allow other technical inputs to hold fast. Saemaul ODA programs thus

place emphasis on group activities, leadership training, and small improvements to farm

infrastructure to mobilize the spirit of development. Veterans of the Saemaul movement

teach villagers to sing Saemaul songs, plant new grains, perform group exercise and

appreciate the merits of hard work (cf. Han, 2015). The national level planning and

macro-economic support of the original Saemaul movement are neglected in favour of

small-scale interventions.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to examine what becomes of the

Saemaul model when implemented in diverse political contexts, we’d like to conclude by

suggesting that despite the fact that Korean development is often lauded as an alternative

to the Washington Consensus, the KSP’s Saemaul narratives fit rather comfortably within

existing mainstream development policy regimes. Their lack of context and

depoliticization of underlying social relations resonates not with an egalitarian vision of

alterative development but with many of the ‘fast policies’ of the supply-side capabilities

approach promoted by the UN’s MDGs (Peck, 2011). As Douglas notes, the version of

Saemaul offered in Korea’s ODA programs

31

“…contrasts greatly with the totality of the SMU experience in Korea in the 1970s. It has no agricultural policy such as the Green Revolution, and it is not packaged with any other broad development program. Government is not asked to be the “big push” for rural development through subsidies or price supports. Land reform is not included as a prerequisite. National economic contexts are not considered as it is presented as a universal model applicable anywhere (2013: 29).”

In other words, while the KSP’s rendering technical of Korean development may allow it

to travel, important questions remain about what lessons its stripped-down version of

Korean development provide, especially for those seeking a more egalitarian, socially

just, and democratic vision of development. The continued circulation of celebratory

narratives of Korean development thus points to the need for ongoing critical engagement

with the experience of Korean development and democratization.11 As Korea expands its

knowledge sharing efforts across the Global South, questions of whose experience is

being shared, what kind of experience it was, and what political and ideological work

gets performed by the circulation of Korean development narratives such as those

promoted by the KSP program will remain important topics for scholars interested in the

politics of development policy models in East Asia and beyond.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their comments as well as Erik Mobrand, Seongjin Jeong, Oscar Watkins, Ngai-ling Sum, Bob Jessop, Rachel Bok and Julie Hearn for comments on earlier drafts and presentations of this article. Nick Scarle and Woo-cheol Kim provided valuable assistance with the map. The article also benefited from presentations of our research at the University of Copenhagen, Lancaster University, Gyeonsang National University, University of British Columbia, and Seoul National University. The research for this article was supported with funding from the Humanities Strategic Investment Fund of the University of Manchester and a Korea Foundation Fellowship for Field Research (KF Ref.: 1022000-003867).

11 As Mawdsley (2015) points out, while the moralizing development narratives of emerging donors involved in South-South cooperation often reframe mainstream development narratives, they also carry the risk of concealing ongoing processes of dispossession, and thus deserve scholarly attention.

32

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Figure 1: Partner Countries Involved in Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program and Saemaul ODA

KSP partners include country partners involved in bilateral consultation studies under the KSP as well as country partners that have participated in multilateral consultation initiatives organized between the KSP and the following multilateral organizations: the OECD, Global Green Growth Institute, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, African Development Band, Asian Development Bank, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Latin America.

Saemaul ODA country partners include outward Saemaul projects undertaken by KOICA, Korea Economic Developent Co-operation Fund, Good Neighbours, North Gyeonsang province, Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Korea Rural Development Administration, Korea Saemaul Undong Center, and the Saemaul Globalization Foundation. The map also includes participants in Saemaul-branded programs run in collaboration with the UNDP, World Food Program, Millennium Promise Foundation, and the UN World Tourism Organization. Participants in leadership training programs that take place within Korea have not been included in the map.

Sources: Based on data included in Korea Development Institute (2016) and supplied by KOICA and the Korea Saemaul Undong Center.

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