Political Leadership, Knowledge, and Socialization and Regional Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring August 2014 Still Dirty After All These Years: Political Leadership, Knowledge, and Socialization and Regional Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia Inkyoung Kim University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Comparative Politics Commons, and the International Relations Commons Recommended Citation Kim, Inkyoung, "Still Dirty After All These Years: Political Leadership, Knowledge, and Socialization and Regional Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 103. https://doi.org/10.7275/5534063.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/103 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STILL DIRTY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: POLITICAL LEADERSHIP, KNOWLEDGE, AND SOCIALIZATION AND REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION IN NORTHEAST ASIA A Dissertation Presented by INKYOUNG KIM Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2014 Political Science © Copyright by Inkyoung Kim 2014 All Rights Reserved STILL DIRTY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: POLITICAL LEADERSHIP, KNOWLEDGE, AND SOCIALIZATION AND REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION IN NORTHEAST ASIA A Dissertation Presented by INKYOUNG KIM Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________ Peter M. Haas, Chair _________________________________ M. J. Peterson, Member _________________________________ Thomas Stevens, Member ______________________________ Brian F. Schaffner, Department Chair Political Science DEDICATION To my parents and restless supporters, Hojun, Owon, and Juwon ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone who has supported this project both intellectually and emotionally. From the ardent dissertation committee members who have made writing this dissertation a perpetual motion, to my interviewees who have shared their knowledge and experiences on regional environmental cooperation, I have so many people to express my deepest gratitude. First of all, I am indebted to Professor Peter Haas simply too much for providing incredibly helpful and timely comments. 60! This is the number of emails that we exchanged in just a week. After conducting many interviews in Northeast Asia during my fieldwork, I wanted to refine my research questions and hypotheses. We kept a trans-Atlantic conversation going for one week to satisfy my intellectual struggles and curiosity. I learned how to devote myself as a scholar and a teacher to help my own students. I am so grateful to have him as my advisor and mentor. I would like to thank Professor M. J. Peterson for her careful reading and comments for earlier drafts. Her thoughtful comments were used to become seeds of further development. I still keep the term paper which I wrote in a graduate seminar with her. I picked up the paper with full of comments when I came back from my trip to South Korea over the summer break. I revised this paper and published it as my first publication to begin my career. I learned how to sacrifice my time and energy for someone else’s improvement. This has made it very difficult for me to decline the review requests from several journals. I am indebted to her for guiding me to be able to find lots of joy in reading and commenting on others’ work as a scholar. I thank Professor Thomas Stevens for serving as a member of my committee and reading my dissertation. He opened my eyes to the economic discourses on environment v by allowing me to audit his cost-benefit class. His continuous support through the years helped me a lot. I also thank Professor Norichika Kanie for discussing this research project in his office and a train in Tokyo. I worked for him as a research assistant while I was doing my fieldwork in Japan. He helped me understand academic and governmental cultures in Japan a lot. This dissertation would not have been possible without numerous interviewees whom I have met throughout my fieldwork. More than 40 scientific experts and government officials from the Republic of Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Europe have involved in sharing their precious experiences and opinions on regional environmental cooperation on transboundary air pollution issues in East Asia. They had to sacrifice their breakfast, lunch, or dinner some times in order to be available for this project, and some interviewees even fed me realizing I was exhausted from the long trips. Their encouragements energized me so much after those long and complicated trips to individual countries and organizations. In particular, I thank Dr. Jang-Min Chu, a Senior Research Fellow at Korea Environment Institute who guided me for the interviews I did in China. Without his offer to travel to China together, my fieldwork in China might have been much tougher. Mr. Gyu-Il Kim, Deputy Director at Ministry of Environment in Korea, has energized me tremendously while I was doing research in Korea and preparing to say bye to my weak father who fought against cancer. Without their encouragements and warm hearts, this research might have been paused for a long time. I also thank many interviewees in the Republic Korea and Japan who did not mind having the second round of interviews to dig into more questions that I wanted to answer, including Dr. Lim-Seok Chang at National Institute of Environmental Research in Korea, vi Professor Katsunori Suzuki at Kanazawa University in Japan, and Dr. Hajime Akimoto at Asia Center for Air Pollution Research in Japan. I thank Dr. Mark Elder at Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan for both granting me an interview and providing me with a research grant for one of chapters in this dissertation. I also thank Ministry of Environment in Japan for allowing me to observe an intergovernmental meeting held in Niigata, Japan in 2010 and various scientific and bureaucratic discussions in Japan. I had incredible hands-on experiences through these meetings. I thank my family and friends for their emotional support. Their support has come from all over the world: from Amherst, Massachusetts in the United States to Daegu, the Republic of Korea. My friends, Yakubu M. Azindow, Kemi Fuentes-George, Kristen Abatsis-McHenry, and J. T. Ghim, have been editors, supporters, together-criers for me. I thank my neighbors in Japan and the United States who were willing to do childcare for numerous hours while I was busy with meeting important deadlines. I also thank all other family members including my three sisters, parents-in-law, and a sister- & brothers-in- law for their continuous support. Most importantly, I am indebted to my mother who was so brave that she was willing to take care of my one-year-old son when I left Korea for the first time for the doctoral program even without knowing how long it would take for my son to join me in the States; my father who did not wait for my completion of this dissertation but was very proud of me; my partner, Hojun Lee, who taught me what sacrifice means; my son, Owon Lee, who taught me what patience means; and my daughter, Juwon Lee, who taught me what joy means. vii ABSTRACT STILL DIRTY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: POLITICAL LEADERSHIP, KNOWLEDGE, AND SOCIALIZATION AND REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION IN NORTHEAST ASIA MAY 2014 INKYOUNG KIM, B.A., SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY M.A., SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Peter M. Haas This dissertation examines the microprocesses of regime creation in Northeast Asia regarding transboundary environmental problems. Despite the growing need for international environmental cooperation and policy coordination at the regional and global levels, Northeast Asia has not yet succeeded in reaching any binding regional agreement on any environmental issue, even though it has developed various environmental cooperative mechanisms regarding transboundary pollution. Rather than characterizing regional environmental cooperative mechanisms in Northeast Asia as “non-regime,” this study unpacks the varying forms of collective action in terms of the speed of development of cooperative mechanisms and the substantive content of the development undertaken by states in the region. The causal relationships between specific forms of political leadership, knowledge, and socialization and the degrees and forms of regional collective action is explored regarding the transboundary air pollution issues of the region, including acid rain, dust and sandstorms, and various long-range transboundary air pollutants. In addition to comparing the participation of countries in viii this region in broader Northeast Asian cooperative mechanisms, the study also analyzes the differences between European and East Asian experiences on this topic. An analysis of the three cases indicates that all three independent variables are only partly associated with varying degrees of collective action as measured by formal features and concrete collective action in Northeast Asia. The study’s comparison of the varying degrees of collective action in Northeast Asia and Europe and among the three