Bureaucratic Rationale and Use of an Academic Concept in Policy-Making: The Rise and Fall of the Regional Innovation System in South Korea

Sonn J. W. and Kang H. Bureaucratic rationale and use of an academic concept in policy-making: the rise and fall of the regional innovation system in South Korea, Regional Studies. This paper contributes to the understanding of the interface between academic research and regional policy. According to the literature on policy rationale, policy-makers select elements from existing academic research that fit their policy rationale. This paper further expands on this idea and argues that bureaucrats not only passively choose academic concepts but also actively reconstruct them. To show this, the paper theoretically distinguishes between three different levels of policy rationale – meta, intermediate and specific – and analyses the way the regional innovation system concept was used in regional policies under South Korea's Roh administration (2003–08).