Is South Korea’s Green Job Policy Sustainable?

Yeon-Mi Jung
Additional contact information
Yeon-Mi Jung: Center for German and European Studies, Chung-Ang University, Hekseok-ro 84, Dongjak-gu, Seoul 156-756, Korea

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 7, 1-20

Abstract: South Korea’s green job policy was implemented in February 2008 as a part of low-carbon green growth policy, but has been discontinued at the present. The country’s actual energy and environmental consumption has continuously increased, and South Korean society has grown increasingly distant from sustainable development. The study constructs a theoretical framework centering on sustainable development and analyzes the process and contents of South Korea’s green job policy. We suggest four findings: First, in terms of ideology, the nation’s green job policy was based on green growth. Implemented as a strategy typical of developing countries, South Korea’s green growth was pursued as weak ecological modernization, relatively stressing economic growth and excluding citizens’ participation. Second, in terms of governance, the nation’s green job policy was led by the central government, thus nearly completely destroying existing legal and institutional infrastructures related to sustainable development. Third, South Korea’s green job policy was defined on the basis of a growth orientation and concentrated on the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project and the NPP project, both of which betrayed considerable problems from the perspective of sustainable development. Fourth, green jobs were created in traditional environmental protection and pollution reduction and therefore limited.

Keywords: green jobs; green growth; sustainable development; ecological modernization; green economy; green new deal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/7/8748/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/7/8748/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:7:y:2015:i:7:p:8748-8767:d:52159

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().