Abstract
A huge area has been in the process of reclamation in the Saemangum area, Cholla North province, Republic of Korea, since 1991. The controversy concerning the objective as well as the value of the tidelands has become a heated issue nationwide. Agencies of the environmental movement and local grassroots organizations have protested the reclamation project, arguing that the project lacks a clear objective and will lead to destruction of the largest tidelands in the country.
This paper aims to examine the temporal space structures of environmental controversies which are socially constructed with regard to regional development issues. The authors clarified the temporal changes in the “Saemangum controversy” through newspapers and key informant interviews over the last five years according to the three different spatial dimensions of national, regional, and local.
The results showed that the points of issue concerning environmental problems with different spatial dimensions constitute multiple structures, varying with the arena of controversy. If an environmental problem is variable according to a spatial dimension as well as a temporal one, the key to solving lies in how to develop the structure of controversy, not in determining the fundamental aspects of the environmental problem.
