Modularizing development: South Korea's Knowledge Sharing Program and the geo-political economy of development expertise

In 2007, South Korea's Ministry of Strategy and Finance (MOSF) and the Korea Development Institute (KDI) launched the Knowledge Sharing Program (KSP) to satisfy the growing interest in Korea's rapid development from high growth economies in East Asia and Africa. The KSP's mandate is "to offer a deeper and wider understanding of Korea’s development experience with the hope that Korea’s past can offer lessons for developing countries in search of sustainable and broad‐based development" (KSP 2011). To do so, the KSP provides users with a modularized set of policy narratives that represent Korea as a unique success story of sustainable and equitable development worth emulating. These
narratives accord South Korea considerable international status and portray it as a country with recent, hands‐on development expertise that is directly relevant to the needs of developing economies. Furthermore, the sharing of this expertise is used to foster diplomatic relations with countries to which Korea has growing trade, production, and migrant networks. The KSP thus reflects not only Korea’s entry into international development assistance but also a continuing transition in Korea's own development policies away from its domestic, heavy industry‐oriented projects of the past towards the expansion and management of new and existing international networks that are deemed strategically important.