Governing Interregional Conflicts: The Planning Approach to Managing Spillovers of Extended Metropolitan Pusan, Korea

A perennial problem of urban industrial growth is spillovers into adjacent governmental jurisdictions. The resulting intergovernmental conflicts provide a window, as a part of urban governance, into conflict management. This paper focuses on such conflicts and the several ways of resolving them that have been attempted in southeastern Korea, centred on the country's major port of Pusan. In one way or another, conflicts with neighbouring Kyungnam Province have been festering since the administrative separation of Pusan as a metropolis, coequal in rank with the province of which it had been the capital. Three approaches of solving the region's problem were tried, all involving the central government in Seoul: aggressive annexations by Pusan of Kyungnam territories; a bland form of nonbinding mediation through an administrative device called ‘association’, and, most recently, a tripartite collaborative form of interregional planning involving Pusan, Kyungnam Province, and the national Ministry of Construction and Transportation. Based on enabling legislation, the collaborative planning approach appears to be working and has been adopted by a number of other conflicted regions in Korea.