Localizing Global Environmental Norms: Agency and Structure in the Republic of Korea

The emergence of global environmental norms (GENs) in the international community has influenced states’ efforts toward governing its environmental problems. The application of the GENs to the domestic context is up to each country, and for developing countries whose attention to the environment came relatively later looked to the international experience to create its own response to the issue. Early norm diffusion literature has often portrayed developing, non-Western states to be passive in this process. However, developing countries can be active norm-takers, and further, norm-makers as exemplified by the case of the Republic of Korea. Against this background, this project asks what domestic factors led Korea to shift from initial resistance to actively localizing GENs. By utilizing an adapted localization framework, focusing on local actors and domestic political structure, the project process-traces the diffusion of two comprehensive norms of environmental protection and sustainable development, and three specific norms of polluter-pays principle, precautionary principle, and public participation into Korea from the 1960s to current. This project’s main findings are: 1) cognitive prior and congruence building processes by the local actors are key to explaining Korea’s localization of sustainable development into green growth, through notably President Lee, Myung-bak’s modification of the external norm to fit the domestic value given to economic growth. This locally constructed idea of green growth was further exported back to the international level; 2) regime type, from authoritarian to democratic, shifted domestic conditions to one that is more conducive for localization; and 3) comprehensive GEN of sustainable development involved hard-localization in which the content of the external norm was modified, and specific GENs involved soft-localization in which the institutional measures to implement the norms were created, selected and advanced to fit the domestic context.