Reflexive idea, argumentative struggle, and institutional change: Environmental controversy on the Tong River Dam construction in Korea

The constitutive capacity of environmental policy-making processes by which reflexive social learning and its institutionalization are accomplished has attracted growing attention to explain the mechanism of institutional change in environmental management. Yet, how social learning and its institutionalization are obtained in environmental policy-making processes are seriously arguable.; The dissertation aims to explain the mechanism of institutional changes through social learning and its institutionalization in environmental policy-making processes. For this purpose, three propositions were proposed based on the conceptual framework stipulated through reviewing the current relevant literatures. The Argumentative Institutional Analysis (AIA), based on the integration of Foucault's archeology, dispositif, and genealogy, is constructed.; Findings from the empirical investigation of the case of environmental policy-making process in Korea in the context of that Tong River Dam controversy support propositions in the conceptual framework. The causes of institutional disjuncture were created by involving actors' reflexivity on practices of environmental policy-making. When involved actors recognized threats to their life and the environment from practices of environmental policy-making structured by the specific environmental discourse, they generated alternative discourses to preserve their security.; Confronted with multiple discourses, involved actors' interactions were characterized by argumentative hegemonic struggle to normalize their own discourse as premier by mobilizing social approval. This pattern of interactions affected the boundary of institutional changes. When the existed dominant discourse retained its normalization power, its conceptualization of problematic situation was dominantly supported, concepts and ideas in different discourses were incorporated with additional policy instruments, and instrumental learning and its institutionalization resulted. Conceptual learning and its institutionalization were generated when alternative discourse replaced the existed dominant discourse by constructing a new dominant social network that supported the alternative discourse. Yet, social relational learning (i.e., the generation of social capital among involved actors) and its institutionalization was difficult because involved actors aimed to repress others' discourse to realize their own objectives.; This dissertation concludes that institutional changes for restructuring the purpose and direction of environmental management are obtained through the contests of various ideas, argumentative struggles among involving actors, and reflexive social choices in environmental policy-making process.