Environmental policy reforms in a global and regional world: Mimetic, diffusive, and coercive policy adoptions in France and Korea

Why is a set of environmental reforms promoted in some political settings but not in others? We have noticed the effect of global and regional institutions on national policy reform prospects, especially since the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)'s Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992. Globalization theories generally assume that international institutions are conducive to crossnational policy convergence. Theories of regionalization posit that the highly integrative European Union (EU)'s environmental policy frameworks have resulted in progressive policy reforms in EU member countries. Furthermore, as institutionally and socioeconomically more mature systems, established democracies and advanced economies are often considered more likely to accept untraditional claims for postmaterialistic, environmental values as policy options. In reality, however, not all of the advanced economies in Europe have comprehensively improved their environmental policies, despite strict EU policy directives. Meanwhile, without coercive regional policy imperatives, transitional democracies often exhibit farther reaching environmental policy implementations than established democracies. For example, Korea's extensive mandatory household separate waste collection systems and resource recycling policies present a research puzzle; what are the major sources and critical policy adoption mechanisms for its reforms?;This research seeks to understand the causal mechanisms of divergent environmental policy developments in established democracies within the EU and transitional democracies outside of the EU. In particular, I investigate the interlocking effect of global institutions, regionalization, national policy legacies, political culture, and transnational environmental advocacy networks (TEANs) on recycling policy reform processes in France and Korea since the 1990s. This research is based on both qualitative and quantitative analyses; process tracing methods and discourse analysis of interviews with key policymakers, professional experts, and environmental activists were used to capture major policy reform dynamics in the two countries. Based on my Environmental Organizations (EO) survey of 23 environmental groups in each country, the dissertation presents original data sets to document the development of and variation in TEANs in established and transitional democracies.;This dissertation's comparative analysis highlights the contextual effect of globalization and regionalization on the environmental policy reform processes of established and transitional democracies. Different from conventional assumptions, the transitional democracy and its mimetic policy learning efforts have been more receptive to global and crossregional policy transfer mechanisms than have the established democracy. In Korea, policymakers and the TEANs have been actively engaged in both crossnational and "crossregional" policy emulation and diffusion processes. Counterintuitively, EU regional policy imperatives have both enabled and constrained policy learning efforts in France; policymakers and TEANs tend to work mostly with their European partners through higher level of information exchanges within the EU and their geographical/cultural similarities. At the same time, however, they have been conditioned by bounded rationality and cultural constraints in ways that they work less with non-European TEANs. Furthermore, the transnationalization of the French environmental organizations turns out to be lower than that of Korea. The French TEANs' transnationalization has decreased since the mid-1990s, whereas their regional networks have been strengthened more than Korean TEANs'. In both established and transitional democracies, TEANs have evolved into critical actors with diverse access points to the multilevel governance in a global world, through resourceful, "enabling" strategies based on professionalized expertise and transnational networks.;These cases also demonstrate that it was more consciously driven mimetic reform initiatives of policymakers and TEANs in the transitional democracy that enabled both crossnational and crossregional policy adoptions. Thus, within the framework of policy transfer research, I highlight mimetic emulation as an analytically distinctive conceptual category, along with diffusive and coercive mechanisms.;Both the predicted and unexpected findings of the comparative research illuminate the significance of regional and national settings in which policymakers and TEANs work for policy reform. The divergent scope and distinct mechanisms of environmental reform in the established and transitional democracies should be understood through the extent to which policymakers and TEANs have exploited the interlocking and constitutive effects of national policy legacies and political culture on policymaking processes in a global and regional world.