Founded in 2013, IGT has advanced the case for structural economic
and social transformation through research, policy engagement, and public deliberation.

IGT was established on the conviction that confronting
the ecological crisis requires more than policy fixes at the margins.
It demanded a serious rethinking of economic arrangements, social institutions,
and the values embedded in governance itself. From the outset, we worked across ecology,
welfare and democratic participation — asking questions that lay at the boundaries of disciplines
and outside the comfort zone of mainstream policy debate.

In the mid-2010s, that early intellectual work took on wider ambitions.
We examined what a basic income could mean for Korea — not as a technocratic fix
but as a structural shift in how societies distribute security and freedom,
and as a foundation for the kind of ecological transition that leaves no one behind.
We convened public roundtables in eleven cities, bringing citizens and researchers
into dialogue on income, welfare, and the future of work.

We hosted national symposia that connected ecological economics with democratic theory and fiscal reform.
We also explored how Korea's constitutional framework might be rewritten to enshrine
ecological limits alongside civic rights, running a lecture series on ecological
thought and publishing the resulting proposals.

From 2021, IGT scaled its work significantly.
We organised national public forum series on what the climate crisis demands of energy systems,
cities, care economies, rural communities, and international cooperation, and began producing
the research that local and national governments needed to move from commitment to action.

Working with domestic and international research partners,
we co-developed Korea's 2050 carbon neutrality scenario,
one of the most detailed roadmaps the country had for reaching net zero.

We produced green job strategies across all 17 regions of South Korea, convened policy forums
with four provincial administrations, and published research on just transition frameworks,
the prospects for green employment in regions facing coal phase-out,
and how supply chain due diligence legislation could be made to work harder.
When the city council of Gwangju — South Korea's sixth-largest city — enacted its green jobs policy in 2024,
drawing directly on IGT research, it was a demonstration that place-specific,
evidence-grounded analysis is often the precondition for political will.

In 2023, we launched the Economic Transformation team, extending our work
into corporate climate accountability, ESG disclosure, transition finance, and supply chain due diligence.
That same year, we launched our annual forum series
"Climate outlook and strategy: Conversations with ten experts," bringing together researchers, policymakers,
and practitioners to take stock of where Korea stands and what the path forward demands.

In 2024, the Climate Advocacy team was established,
conducting Korea's first large-scale national climate perception surveys, strengthening civic engagement,
and working to embed climate responsibility in electoral discourse.
By 2025, that work had achieved a notable milestone: in collaboration with partner organisations,
IGT helped secure the inclusion of climate as a dedicated topic in presidential election debates
for the first time in Korea's history.
Our international partnerships grew alongside this expansion, with collaborative research connecting
IGT's Korea-focused work to global debates on decarbonisation and just transition.

Our most recent publications address the fiscal architecture that Korea's path to carbon neutrality demands:
how public budgets should be reorientated, where the tax system needs to change,
and what support smaller enterprises need to navigate the transition.

As IGT matures, our work is becoming more sharply focused.
We are developing models for climate neutrality at the local and regional level, deepening our research on
climate governance and community engagement, and pushing further into the economics of transition finance,
green budgeting, and the role of central banks in driving decarbonisation.
Taken together, this agenda is oriented towards a single aim: equipping Korea with the analysis
and policy tools it needs to meet its 2030 targets and build credibly towards carbon neutrality by 2050.
We remain an independent research institute, evidence-led and solutions-oriented,
committed to the view that a just transition is not a constraint on ambition, but the condition for it.