The politics of post-developmentalist expertise: progressive movements, strategic localism, and urban governance in Seoul

Abstract

This article interrogates emergent forms of progressive ‘post-developmentalist’ urban expertise in Seoul, South Korea. We argue that a critical understanding of the nexus between political and civil society forged by pro-democratic activism is necessary to understand the politics of this expertise and the dilemmas it has encountered in creating alternatives to the legacy of developmentalist urbanization and promoting a more inclusive and emancipatory vision of urban politics. To illustrate our argument, we examine two cases: the first involves the incorporation of progressive labour, intellectual, and civil society activists to create urban-level institutions of social dialogue to upgrade labour relations. The second explores a community-empowerment movement, called Maulmandeulgi, initiated by local activists and later institutionalized in Seoul and other cities to establish a participatory model of community building. These cases detail how these actors have promoted progressive policies through engaging in strategic forms of localism, but also how their activity has risked becoming a policy fix for reconfigured neoliberal and developmentalist policy agendas. This risk is most apparent, we argue, as the political context at the national level has shifted between conservative and liberal administrations and the knowledge practices developed by these experts encouraged to move between places and across scale.