Working Paper
A New Institutionalist Analysis on Emerging Donorship

This study aims to provide a neo-institutional explanation of why South Korea increasingly intends to share its developmental experience with the rest of the world. South Korea’s knowledge sharing projects are the leading example of expansionary and self-defining efforts of its aid administration. By analysing the aid policy-making process, this paper explores the inside dynamics of an emerging donor government—pinpointing why aid bureaucracy stands at the centre of the rise of the knowledge dimension. This research highlights the particular statist developmentalism—as major bureaucratic discourse and momentum behind the aid expansion—that appears to be neither necessarily strategic nor coherent.