South Korea's Water Resources Policy toward the 21st Century: Conflicting Views

Abstract

The scarcity of fresh water is becoming a global problem. The difficulty of securing a sufficient supply of fresh water is becoming more serious in a growing number of countries. It is appalling to hear that nearly a quarter of the worlds 6 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, while almost half lack adequate sanitation. A more chilling prediction has it that more than 3 billion people will suffer from water shortages by around 2025. There is a serious conflict between environmentalists and government water policy-makers in South Korea. Developing a win-win policy is desirable. Win-win is called super-optimizing or doing better than the previous best of all major groups. This paper proposed five major steps to win-win policy analysis. 1. What are the major goals of environmentalists, or other major groups who are disputing what policy should be adopted for a given policy problem? 2. What are the major alternatives of these groups for dealing with the policy problem? 3. What are the relations between each major alternative and each major goal? 4. What new alternative is there that might be capable of (a) achieving the environmental goals even better than the environmental alternative, and (b) achieving the developmental goals even better than the developmental alternative? 5. Is the proposed win-win alternative capable of getting over various hurdles-political, administrative, technological, legal, psychological and economic-that frequently exist?