Authoritarian environmentalism under democracy: Korea’s river restoration project

Abstract

The impacts that governments and institutions have on environmental policy-making constitute a core concern in environmental politics. Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) presents a model of top-down, non-participatory environmental policy-making. The model, however, remains underspecified with its premises untested and its application confined to non-democratic countries. This study addresses these gaps through a case study of South Korea’s Four Major Rivers Restoration Project. The study illustrates how various path-dependent legacies from the era of the authoritarian developmental state shaped the policy context in which policymakers in democratic Korea adopted AE as its approach to environmental governance. More broadly, this case demonstrates how the relationship between a type of regime and its mode of policy-making and policy outcomes is tenuous, suggesting that environmental politics should move beyond the examination of formal institutional features to incorporate various state development trajectories to unravel the nature of their environmental politics and policy-making.