Things began in 2008 when the Lee Myung-bak government announced the prioritisation of a ‘Green Growth’ initiative. South Korea’s Green Growth initiative was an ambitious and comprehensive national project, which sought to initiate an economy-wide transition away from the decades-long commitment to fossil fuel-based ‘brown growth’.
After her election in 2013, President Park Geun-hye initially distanced herself from her predecessor’s initiative. Yet doubts over the current government’s commitment to driving green growth appear to have been addressed through the formation of the Prime-Ministerial Committee on Green Growth. This committee is the successor to the former Presidential Committee on Green Growth, a high-level governmental body responsible for coordinating Green Growth during the Lee administration. This commitment was made resolutely clear (although without using the terminology of Green Growth) in Park’s keynote speech at the recent COP21 climate conference in Paris.
Green Growth is now just one part — albeit an important pillar — of the Park government’s emphasis on nurturing an innovation-intensive ‘Creative Economy’. In 2014 the government launched the country’s Second Five-Year-Plan for Green Growth (2014-2018), which focuses on driving forward many of the initiatives developed during the First Five Year Plan (2009–2013).
Major milestones to date include the completion of the world’s largest smart grid testbed on Jeju Island — the key enabling infrastructure for the wide and efficient use of renewable energy sources via the infusion of information and communications technologies into the power grid. The idea is to allow domestic firms to use the testbed to trial new technologies and services before launching their products into international markets.
In October 2014 the government, with the participation of the government-owned electricity utility, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), successfully completed a microgrid testbed on Gasa Island. For now, microgrids are small scale autonomous energy systems and are seen as stepping stones to the launch of full-scale smart grids. South Korean companies such as LSIS are presently seeking to export their technological knowhow in microgrid systems throughout the region.
South Korean firms are rapidly rising as market leaders in the creation, manufacture and export of energy storage systems — which will be critical in successfully introducing electric vehicles on a wide scale via smart grids. Take, for instance, LG Chemicals: the company is fast approaching Panasonic’s lead in this area by becoming an alternative supplier to Tesla, GM, Ford, amongst other leading automotive companies. It also has a contract with a major German utility company, Steag. South Korea’s automotive industry is playing its part through the development of mass-produced electric vehicles manufactured by Kia and Hyundai.
On the global front, the South Korean government successfully led the establishment of the Green Climate Fund, the Global Green Growth Institute and the Climate Technology Centre & Network. These initiatives were driven by the former Senior Secretary for Green Growth in the Office of President Lee Myung-bak in his vision to establish a ‘Global Green Growth Architecture’ to promote green growth throughout the developing and developed worlds
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To further accelerate the adoption of green growth globally, the government launched the world’s first Graduate School for Green Growth at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology. And the Korea Export–Import (KEXIM) Bank issued the world’s first ‘climate bond’ backed by a national government to a value of US$500 million — a development significant enough to lead one observer to depict Korea as a ‘Global Environmental Leader’. KEXIM’s climate bond provides a mechanism to accelerate the take-up of clean technology projects by providing cheaper capital (and reputable green financial securities for large institutional investors) than would be the case via conventional bank-based finance.
Even in the face of both institutional and political interests to remain locked in to ‘brown growth’ and a change in political leadership in 2013, South Korea remains committed to positioning itself as a leader in the global race towards building renewable energy technology industries. Why is this so?
Three factors appear to be the most critical in explaining how South Korea has pursued a transition to green growth, as Elizabeth Thurbon and I have argued. The first is the need to rethink the relationship between economic and environmental goals and to embrace a new philosophical mindset, which we have coined ‘developmental environmentalism’.
Developing high levels of centralised coordinating capacity within the government is another crucial requirement. In South Korea this is manifested in the creation of first the Presidential and now the Prime-Ministerial Green Growth Committees.
South Korea’s acute dependence on imported fossil-fuels has further provided a key motivation in the drive towards green growth. As John Mathews and Hao Tan recently stated in Nature, manufacturing renewables is a pathway to build energy security. These are the reasons behind South Korea’s growing presence in the strategic growth industries of the future. South Korea’s success offers important lessons for the region in how to drive a green growth agenda even from the most unlikely candidates.
Sung-Young Kim is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, The University of Auckland.
This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2012-BAA-2101).
Thanks for an enlightening summary of the new directions S Korea is taking in this area. It is heartening that a country can institute such seemingly ‘radical’ changes in policy in such a relatively short time.
S Korea has the advantage of being relatively small and highly centralized when it comes to instituting such changes. But perhaps other countries can adapt some of its decision making and institutional realignments in their own way. Further follow up articles about how this might be done in other Asian countries would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Richard, thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s interesting to think about the Korean experience as something ‘radical’. My view is that GG is radical in terms of viewing the economy-environment relationship from one based on a trade-off to one, which is now seen as synergistic. But, GG is also highly consistent with Korea’s long-held tradition of developmentalism. I take your point about lessons we might derive from the Koreans and yes, it would indeed be very interesting about how other countries might pursue GG including and beyond the East Asian context.
Does this mean that the young people will now be getting full-time, permanent work?
Hi G, the issue of Youth unemployment in South Korea is a looming and complex issue. It also cannot be analysed without discussing the unprecedented levels of economic inequality, economic hardship experienced by everyday working Koreans especially the elderly. Indeed, these concerns were some of the main drivers behind the Korean government’s commitment to GG back in 2008 and even now (through the creation of new high-technology industries). Whether the government’s initiatives are having a positive effect on employment is an important and interesting question. If the answer is ‘no’, I think an equally important question is what types of Youth participation are evident in the workforce and why patterns (such as obtaining irregular/casual work) is so prominent.
Sung-Young Kim. It seems that the youth employment was looming for a long time according to the September 11, 2015 article on this website regarding discontent among the young people particularly after the Asian economic crisis in the 1990s. You have unwillingness of the South Korean companies wanting to put the people (young and old) back to full-time employment.
This article is strangely uncritical. It ignores all the debates on whether the ROK is really walking the green walk, or just talking the talk. Contrast these two articles:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a47c3648-6673-11e4-8bf6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ykiForSG and
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=2995553
If even Seoul’s leading conservative daily poses the stark question “Green growth or greenwashing?”, how can this be blandly ignored? We need analysis, not PR.
G’day Aidan, thanks for raising this issue, which in fact, has been around since GG was first launched. I tackled this very issue at length in my co-authored article in ‘Politics and Society’ journal (linked in the text above). My view is that the label green washing ignores many of the key achievements in tackling climate change and energy (in)security via technology-based strategies as I discuss above. I make it explicitly clear in my journal-length article that GG may not be a genuine marriage between economic and environmental goals (and I’m not sure any country has been able to achieve this) but nor is it a simplistic case of a ‘sham marriage’ or green washing. GG is an attempt to pursue environmentalism as an extension of the long-held tradition of developmentalism in South Korea.