A study of the state-nature relations in a developmental state

Abstract

The East Asian ‘developmental state thesis’ (hereafter, DST) was suggested to explain the East Asian development states (i.e. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore), where the role of the state has been very significant in producing ‘the East Asian economic miracle.’ However, the natural world has received little attention in DST scholarship. It is ironic that nature as a resource is intrinsically important to national economic development in East Asia, but research related to this issue is nonexistent. In particular, water, among the natural resources, is crucial because it is the backbone of economic growth in contexts that include hydroelectric power, industrial water for factories and residential water. <br /> Since the 1960s, the Korean state has been active in pursuing various water resource development policies. For example, the Ten Year Water Resource Development Plan (1965) was designed to comprehensively develop water resources, including flood control and water utilization. The Specific Multipurpose Dam Act (1966) was a special law aiming at smoother and more efficient construction of multipurpose dams, replacing the River Act, which focused on flood control. The establishment of the Korea Water Resource Development Corporation (KWRC) (1967), which assumed the responsibility of water management from the extant river authorities, strongly advocated the construction of multipurpose dams. Based on the description thus far, the DST appears useful for explaining the role of the state in water resource development. However, understanding the context at this level is superficial. We must understand state-nature relations to properly explain how water resource development policies were established and pursued by the Korean developmental state. This thesis aims to explore how the Korean state played a key role in developing the discursive and material construction of nature. This thesis is theoretically informed by recent development of the literature on the social construction of nature and the state-nature relation. Recently, there is increasing attention to the debate on critical hydro-politics in studies of water resource development and policy. Conventionally, water is regarded as a pure and natural substance in the form of H₂O, detached from human society, but water should be seen as ‘social nature’ that is the assemblage of materiality and discursivity of human and non-human factors. The state plays a particularly prominent role in establishing the relationship between water and society. However, existing literature on hydro-politics does not sufficiently theorize the role of the state in hydro-politics. Recent studies of ‘state-nature’ relations emphasize the significance of the state role in the social construction of nature and argue that the state develops an intimate relationship with nature for its politico-economic ends using spatial strategies, such as framing, centralization and territorialisation. <br /> The ‘state-nature’ literature can be effective in exploring the state-nature relations in the contexts of the East Asian development states. However, the DST is theoretically limited in explaining the state-nature relations. First, the DST tends to consider the state to be a gathering of a handful of bureaucrats who have plan-rationality and a pre-ordained separation from society. Second, the DST pays less attention to the dialectic link between society and nature in describing the process of capitalist production, and this may overgeneralize the episteme that all nature is equal to a pre-given ‘resource.’ Third, DST tends to be insensitive to interaction between the path-dependency of a developmental state and emergent changes (e.g., democratization and neoliberalization). <br /> Based on the above problem orientation, by focusing on the water resource policy of the Korean developmental state (1961-2015), the analytic focus is to explore the ways in which the state-nature relationship as a ‘second nature’ is materially and discursively produced by social forces that pursue their own political and economic ends by acting in and through the state. More detailed research questions are as follows: <br /> A) What were the state’s intentions in advocating a certain water resource policy? <br /> B) How was the relationship between the state and nature constructed? <br /> C) How did the former regime’s state-nature relationship impact the latter regime, and what changed this relationship under the latter regime? <br /> D) How does this perspective help us rethink the developmental state vis-à-vis nature? <br /> Based on these analyses, this thesis emphasizes the significance of the state role in hydro-politics, and suggests to see hydro-politics in terms of materially and discursively contested interactions among social forces acting in and through the state.