1. Introduction: Developmental Social Governance in Transition

This book characterizes South Korea’s pre-neoliberal regime of social governance as developmental liberalism and analyzes the turbulent processes and complex outcomes of its neoliberal deformation since the mid-1990s. Instead of repeating the politically charged critical view on South Korea’s failure in socially inclusionary and sustainable development, I closely examine the systemic interfaces of the economic, political, and social constituents of its developmental transformation. Developmental liberalism is the developmental state’s (both explicit and implicit) regime of social governance, under which a wide range of social policies have been strategically harnessed for facilitating capitalist industrialization and economic growth as the nation’s prime purpose. South Korea’s neoliberal transition, initially conceived since the late 1980s, ironically along its democratic transformation, and radically accelerated during the national financial crisis in the late 1990s, turned out incomparably volatile and destructive crucially due to its various distortive effects on the country’s developmental liberal order.