Korea’s Sustainable Development Strategy

This paper explains Korea’s sustainable development strategy and its limitations, and explores alternatives for the same. For this purpose, this paper examines long-term development strategies of advanced countries and the state of environmental problems in Korea, and suggests the necessity of adopting a different sustainable development strategy. Like the long-term development strategies of advanced countries, Korea’s longterm development strategies also revolve around the concept of 4S: smart, safe, sustainable, and strong. Each attribute characterizes today’s top-notch science and technology (S&T) based networked society that has advanced information technology (IT), is safe, environmentally sustainable, and has strong national competitiveness. However, unlike other countries, in Korea, most development strategies were established by different committees that had their own objectives and thus, there is a lack of close coordination among the different strategies. The result has been divergence rather than convergence of efforts for development. In particular, in the case of Korea, where economism is deeply institutionalized, integrating the sustainable development strategy with economic development can be an effective way of improving the overall strategy supported by the government. Simply put, making strong Korea the final goal and repositioning sustainable and safe Korea strategies as means for achieving the same on the basis of a smart Korea is a more effective approach. For this, a new control setup that will effectively coordinate the sustainable strategy and other development strategies needs to be established.