Ambiguous ambition: The politics of South Korea and the global plastics treaty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract States were again unable to reach consensus on the text of a plastics treaty during negotiations in Geneva in 2025. The majority of states stood firm against petrochemical interests and demanded a “high-ambition” treaty with binding global obligations across the full life cycle of plastics. What these states specifically support, however, varies considerably, as does the strength of their commitment. The case of South Korea offers insights into how changes in political leadership, industry lobbying, shifting narratives and competing foreign policy goals can shape the nature of ambition. Early in the negotiations, South Korea called for ambitious measures and was chosen to host the final round of talks set for late 2024. Yet, this did not translate into meaningful action or strong advocacy in later stages. Some South Korean policymakers may have been sincerely committed to global controls. South Korea’s early signaling of high ambition, however, was primarily motivated by strategic calculations to influence the treaty and become a “global pivotal state.” Its support for ambition, moreover, grew increasingly ambiguous as leadership changed and as states describing themselves as “ambitious” pushed for binding controls on plastics production and supply. South Korea’s foreign policy strategy, we further argue, failed to enhance the country’s diplomatic standing, as its ambiguous ambition came to light, and as industry recalcitrance, bureaucratic infighting and political turmoil undermined its capacity for effective leadership.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".