Urban water governance as policy boosterism: Seoul’s legitimation at the local and global scale

Abstract

While cities gain international momentum, they increasingly connect to innovate and learn from each other. The attraction of attention and resources lies beneath the economic reasons that drive most of the international entrepreneurship of city governments. In parallel to common market-based strategies, cities also harness their key internal policies as value-added elements to share among peers in order to enhance their transnational reputation. Contrary to business-friendly initiatives that are embedded in an economic rationality, this second type of transnational entrepreneurship revolves around the perceived reputation of local policy-making actors in their own right. By establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between urban geography and international studies, this article proposes the international promotion of Seoul’s water management policy as an empirical case of policy boosterism, unearthing a social practice of legitimation enacted by the city government of Seoul that is simultaneously local and global.