Anxieties of an emerging donor: The Korean development experience and the politics of international development cooperation

Jamie Doucette

Environment and Planning C, 2020, vol. 38, issue 4, 656-673

Abstract: This article examines recent knowledge sharing initiatives aimed at promoting South Korea’s development experience as a ‘development alternative’ and questions the coherence of the narratives being shared. Drawing upon an idea first put forward by Anna Tsing , I discuss how South Korea’s development cooperation initiatives occupy a zone of awkward engagement in which multiple meanings of its experience have proliferated and explore the anxieties that this engagement creates for practitioners. In particular, the article finds that practitioner anxiety is informed by a triple set of pressures for Korea to export an alternative development model, extend the overseas activities of domestic businesses, and entertain the ambitions of ruling political blocs. By focusing on questions of anxious engagement and the seemingly strategic ambiguity of knowledge sharing efforts it produces, the article highlights some of the limits and possibilities that shape the promotion of the Korean developmental state as an alternative development model for South–South cooperation and extends the emotional register of literature on emerging donors by questioning discursive claims that privilege empathy and reciprocity as drivers of development cooperation.

Keywords: Emerging donors; development cooperation; developmental state; South–South cooperation; development geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654420904082 (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:sae:envirc:v:38:y:2020:i:4:p:656-673

DOI: 10.1177/2399654420904082

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().