Governing Public Safety Networks: Institutional Paths and Governance Dilemmas in South Korea and the United States

• In Event: Governance Ecosystems: Innovation, Institutional Design, and Policy Outcomes

Abstract

This study addresses that gap directly.  The selection of South Korea and the United States as comparative cases is analytically strategic, not merely illustrative. South Korea's Safe-Net is the world's first 3GPP-standard-based nationwide public safety LTE (PS-LTE) network, achieving full operational status in 2021. The United States' FirstNet stands as the world's second such system to reach full national deployment. Critically, both networks have moved well beyond construction into sustained operation, generating real-world governance tensions and unexpected outcomes that other countries have yet to encounter. This matters enormously: dozens of countries — including France, which piloted mission-critical LTE services during the Paris Olympics, as well as the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Australia, and Japan — are at this very moment navigating decisions about how to design and govern their own national public safety broadband networks. They are choosing governance paths without systematic evidence about what those paths actually produce once a network is running. This study offers precisely that evidence.  The two cases also satisfy the logic of the Most Different Systems Design (MDSD), providing a quasi-experimental condition for causal inference. On the side of controlled variables, both countries experienced catastrophic emergency communications failures as the critical juncture that opened the policy window — the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea — and both subsequently committed to building a nationwide PS-LTE network using the same 4G LTE technology standard. On the side of varying conditions, the two systems differ sharply along dimensions that historical institutionalism identifies as decisive: South Korea is a centralized unitary state with a strong developmental state legacy, while the United States is a federal system with a regulatory state tradition that privileges market autonomy. These systemic differences, the study argues, are the primary drivers of divergent governance path selection, and holding the former constant while varying the latter strengthens the study's causal inferential logic.  The study is organized around two research questions that are causally connected through the concept of path dependency. RQ1 asks: why, despite facing analogous critical junctures,  did South Korea and the United States adopt such different institutional paths — the former a State-led model, the latter a Public-Private Partnership model? RQ2 asks: what characteristic outcomes and inherent dilemmas has each path produced in the operational phase? The causal link is central: the institutional path established at the moment of critical juncture structurally constrains what kinds of operational outcomes become possible or unavoidable. Path dependency is not merely a background condition but the analytical spine connecting the study's two explanatory moves.

Author

• EUNKYUNG LEE, Seoul National University
  Presenting Author