Paper short abstract:

This article examines the role of Korea's large, family-led conglomerates (chaebol) in the international development sector.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 1990s, member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) have increasingly outsourced the provision of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to the private sector. However, the inclusion of for-profit companies with little history of involvement in the development sector is a relatively recent phenomenon. The traditional DAC donors and multilateral organisations such as the United Nations (UN) now rely on a range of private companies for pooling funds as well as the execution of development-related services.

On a multilateral forum the renewed support for the private sector in international development was officially accepted in the 2010 UN Millennium Summit and affirmed in the 2011 Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. While these platforms established an enhanced role for the private sector of the DAC members only , non-traditional donors have been also engineered their development cooperation models around their respective private sectors

South Korea's new and evolving ODA model has used the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to link the role of private companies to international development. Analysing the roots and history of CSR in South Korea and the nature of its application by Korean private companies in developing countries we address the changing role of development assistance in internationalising the Korean state and Korean capital.

We argue that one way of analysing the Korean state's embedding of CSR into the framework of international development is to understand the changing nature of Korea's Global Value Chains (GVC)s in developing countries.