Coordination, Incentives, and Persuasion: South Korea’s Comprehensive Approach to COVID-19 Containment*

A rapid and comprehensive policy response allowed South Korea to contain an aggressive outbreak of COVID-19 without resorting to the harsh lockdown measures necessitated in other countries. However, while the general content of Korea’s response is now fairly well-known, what has received less attention is the unique governance context in which the country’s containment strategy was formulated and implemented. This article focuses on 3 administrative elements of Korea’s pandemic containment approach. First, the central government effectively coordinated the efforts of sub-national governments to ensure critical resource availability and deliver a response calibrated to the situation of each locale. Second, ongoing inter-sectoral collaboration was used to marshal non-government resources in both the biotech and medical sectors which in turn enabled core features of Korea’s policy, including a rapid acceleration of testing. Third, a timely, accessible, and technocratic communications strategy, led by public health experts and leveraging the country’s highly developed information and communications technology systems, facilitated citizen trust and ultimately voluntary compliance with public health directives. Although the Korean approach offers a number of lessons for other countries, by ignoring the specific administrative and social characteristics that are relevant to its implementation, policymakers risk overestimating its inter-contextual portability. By thoroughly contextualizing Korea’s virus containment strategy, this article seeks to minimize this risk.