Turning Korea’s development experience into data-driven stories

Our mission is to move beyond one-off narratives and distill transferable policy mechanisms from Korea’s development experience to address today’s challenges.

The

Beginning

In 2012, KDI School launched K-Developedia as an online platform dedicated to sharing Korea’s development experience with the international community. The initiative was grounded in a clear institutional mission: to support mutual learning and growth by making Korea’s policy and development knowledge accessible to policymakers, researchers, and students in developing and transitioning economies. From the outset, K-Developedia emphasized the provision of unique, up-to-date, and reliable content, drawing on both original materials and curated links to domestic and international databases.

Beyond content accumulation, the platform was designed as a search-centered, user-oriented web service that reflected contemporary standards in digital knowledge provision. Positioned at the core of KDI School’s broader efforts to conduct and disseminate research on Korea’s development experience, K-Developedia aimed to function as more than a static archive. It sought to compile, connect, and reproduce knowledge by linking fragmented policy records, research outputs, and datasets into an integrated online infrastructure. In doing so, it established itself as a representative gateway to Korea’s development experience—one that prioritized accessibility, credibility, and scale, while laying the institutional foundation for future reinterpretation and expansion.

Our

Journey

A decisive shift began in the summer of 2022, when the platform was reoriented under the leadership of Changkeun Lee and its purpose was fundamentally reconsidered. While K-Developedia had successfully accumulated a substantial body of development-related materials over its first decade, concerns emerged about how Korea’s experience was being consumed—often as a one-off national story rather than as a source of transferable insight. This prompted an initial move away from a static, archive-oriented model toward reinterpreting Korea’s development experience through contemporary and generalizable policy lenses. Although this direction temporarily lost momentum amid a leadership gap from late 2023 through 2024, the conceptual shift had already been clearly articulated.

This reorientation crystallized during K-Developedia’s 10th Anniversary Conference in 2022, which served as a critical intellectual inflection point. In the keynote lecture, James Robinson reframed Korean industrialization by emphasizing policy decision-making processes, export promotion, and the role of state–business networks—redirecting attention from descriptive history to underlying mechanisms. Subsequent sessions reassessed the platform’s first decade, examined evolving global demand for development knowledge, and explored how data science, visualization, and narrative approaches could unlock new insights from familiar material. Together, these discussions clarified a shared direction that would later be fully operationalized: K-Developedia would move beyond documentation to become a modern knowledge platform that actively extracts, visualizes, and communicates transferable policy mechanisms relevant to today’s challenges.

Now

Where We Are

Building on this earlier reorientation, K-Developedia entered a full-scale reboot in 2025, driven as a collective effort by faculty and students working closely together. The platform is being comprehensively redesigned by applying data visualization and web-native storytelling to reorganize legacy content into user-friendly formats, while accumulated reports are being transformed into structured learning materials that can be directly used in educational settings.

At the same time, the scope of content has been substantially expanded to reflect growing demand for insights from Korea’s post-2000 policy experience. New materials increasingly incorporate user perspectives and externally produced contributions, strengthening interaction with a broader and more diverse audience. This ongoing transformation is the result of collaborative work by the current project team, whose members are listed at the bottom of this page. Together, they are shaping K-Developedia into an open, evolving knowledge space—stay tuned.

Meet the Team

Director

Changkeun Lee

Professor, KDI School

cklee@kdischool.ac.kr
Changkeun led the K-Developedia project from September 2022 to August 2023 and has again overseen the initiative since January 2025. He initiated and directed the 2025 reboot, which sought to transform the website from a static collection of articles into an interactive, user-engaging knowledge platform.The reboot emphasized the systematic use of data visualization and communication techniques, drawing on his expertise as an economic historian and policy researcher to redesign content to enhance accessibility, narrative clarity, and analytical depth, while actively fostering engagement with a broader audience beyond academic and policy communities.
climate policy
climate finance
blended finance
Data Visualization and Curation Lead

Soomin Lim

Analyst at Climate Strategy and Delivery team, EBRD
MPP graduate, KDI School

soominlim819@gmail.com
Soomin played a central role in the 2025 reboot of K-Developedia, contributing to content planning, data visualization, and analytical review. She enhanced the coherence and quality of individual articles while ensuring continuity with K-Developedia’s core vision and intellectual identity. As an analyst at the EBRD, Soomin focuses on climate data analytics and visualization, blended finance strategy and knowledge product creation.
climate policy
climate finance
blended finance
Content Curation Lead

Jisu Jung

MDP graduate, KDI School

jisujung@kdis.ac.kr
Jisu contributed to the 2025 reboot of K-Developedia through data visualization and editorial review. She worked on improving content quality and consistency, refining narratives for clarity, and aligning content with visualization and formatting standards. She focuses on data storytelling for public understanding, with broader interests in Korean development policy and environmental risk management.
natural disaster management
forest governance
climate resilience
Data Visualization Lead

Haelin Park

MDP student, KDI School

parkhlinpm@gmail.com
Haelin was involved in the 2025 reboot of the platform, focusing on platform restructuring, data visualization, and final editorial review. She transformed existing content into engaging and interactive visual narratives and ensured consistency across articles in terms of structure, formatting, and visualization standards. Previously, she managed an Open Course Ware (OCW) platform under Handong UNITWIN projects, leading content reorganization and platform development.
education
knowledge sharing platforms
sustainable development
Administrative Support

Gayoung Jeon

Specialist, KDI School

gy_jeon@kdischool.ac.kr
Gayoung provides essential administrative and budgetary support for the K-Developedia team, ensuring that day-to-day operations run smoothly. By streamlining administrative processes and handling logistics with clarity and efficiency, she enables the team to focus on research, content development, and delivery.
Technical Support

Haeun Hannah Kim

Research associate, KDI
MDP graduate, KDI School

hannah.hkim@kdis.ac.kr
Hannah is a KDIS alumna, and she has supported K-Devlopedia with technical operations since the reboot.

Contributors

2025 - Reboot of K-Developedia

Content Improvement and Visualization

Yujung Ahn (MDP student, KDIS)
Sujin Jung (MDP student, KDIS)
Tika Khaopoon (MDP graduate, KDIS)
Hyomin Kwon (MDP student, KDIS)
Myoungeun Lee (MDP student, KDIS)
Seoyleon Moon (MDP student, KDIS)
Gunwoo Park (MPP student, KDIS)

2022 - Initial Redesign Phase

Conceptual Framing and Early Visualization

Kyonggi Min (MDP graduate, KDIS)
- now a PhD student in Economics at Georgia Institute of Technology
Jody Park (MDP graduate, KDIS)
- now a PhD student in Political Science at Penn State University

2010s - First Decade

Initial site launch and content collection

You Na Chang (staff, KDIS)