Governance Without Governance: The Paradox of Superposed Citizenship in Korea’s Nuclear Waste Politics

• In Event: Innovating Technology, Communication, and Governance – The Case of SMR

Abstract

In risk society, participatory governance has been widely promoted as a mechanism for ensuring democratic legitimacy and procedural transparency, especially in the management of high-risk technologies like radioactive waste. However, in practice, such governance often serves to legitimize already determined policy directions under the guise of inclusion. This paper critically examines the legislative process of Korea’s Special Act on the Management of High-Level Radioactive Waste (2022–2025) as a case in which “participatory governance” functioned less as a deliberative forum and more as a tool for political rationalization.

Drawing on document analysis (legal texts, policy reports, and media articles) and five in-depth interviews with actors involved in drafting the legislation—including civil society representatives and party staff—the study traces how civil society’s central demand, namely the legal prohibition of nuclear waste repositories in regions already hosting nuclear power plants, was excluded early in the negotiation process. This demand was labeled “idealistic” and incompatible with legislative scope, as lawmakers prioritized a more “realistic” objective: curbing the extension of nuclear power plant lifespans. This strategy centered on including a clause requiring spent fuel generated up to the end of a reactor’s design life to be moved to a centralized repository. However, this strategy failed due to the policy's interpretive ambiguity and the continued viability of wet storage, which rendered the provision largely ineffective.

This study illustrates what I call the paradox of superposed citizenship—a political condition where citizen participation is invoked both as a symbol of democratic legitimacy and simultaneously rendered inconsequential. Citizens’ suffering is recognized as the moral justification for participation, yet the actual outcomes are shaped by the strategic calculations of political and technical elites. Participation appears to influence institutional design, but in practice functions to legitimize and conceal the nullification of political demands.

Such governance without governance entails a technopolitical configuration in which participation and exclusion, politicization and technocracy, and pain and dismissal are held in tension. It exemplifies how the very structures designed to facilitate inclusion can operate as tools of strategic containment. In this case, the democratic vocabulary of shared responsibility and deliberation was deployed without institutional mechanisms to meaningfully translate dissenting views into policy.

This case suggests that the crisis of democracy in risk society lies not merely in insufficient participation but in institutional formations that render participation politically inert while preserving the appearance of legitimacy. It calls for a renewed attention to the structures and narratives through which governance claims are made—and undone.

Author

• Hyomin _ Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Presenting Author