The Saemangeum Reclamation Project and politics of regionalism in South Korea
Abstract The Saemangeum Reclamation Project (SRP) was launched shortly before South Korea's 1987 presidential election, which is generally accepted as the turning point from authoritarian regimes to democracy. The SRP began as an election-time pledge given by unpopular authoritarian elites, who appropriated the SRP to garner votes in the underdeveloped Jeolla provinces in the southwest. Astonishingly, this enormous, state-led project was implemented, without any elaboration or budget plan, and despite strong public and government opposition. The present paper attempts to elucidate that the agenda-setting, policy enforcement, and project implementation of the SRP can be explained through: 1) political processes, 2) interplays between the institutional politics of different political parties and non-institutional politics of social actors, and 3) interactions between political regionalism and developmentalism. Several observations can be made: 1) The SRP has been placed at the center of several elections, which have bridged political desires for power, regional interests in development, and the public's environmental consciousness. 2) Institutional politicians have attempted to translate the SRP into votes by stimulating desires to develop the Jeolla region, whereas the non-institutional politics of social actors attempted to nullify the project by raising environmental consciousness. 3) Political pork-barreling has promoted and exploited patterned regional voting with the promise of developing the Jeolla region into a hypermodern center of East Asia through the SRP. Metamorphosis of the project from the reclamation of rice fields to the development of an “East Asian Dubai” reveals the developmentalism and associated regionalism in Korean politics.