Balanced Development in Globalizing Regional Development? Unpacking the New Regional Policy of South Korea

Abstract

Lee Y.-S. Balanced development in globalizing regional development? Unpacking the new regional policy of South Korea, Regional Studies. This paper critically examines South Korea's adoption of 'new regionalism' as a basis for its regional policy initiatives. It is argued that this new regional policy poses dualism between endogenism and exogenism, and as such fails to reformulate and re-articulate theoretical and policy views on the globalization of regional development. Instead of dualism, a concept of 'multi-scalar governance' has been developed as an analytical lens through which regional development in the era of globalization can be analysed. Based on this viewpoint, the drawbacks of the new regional policy - the problems of triangular inter-scalar coordination - are specifically reviewed. For this analysis, archival re-examination and in-depth interviews with policy-makers have been employed. [GRAPHICS]