The once-promising offshore plant industry in South Korea is on the verge of collapse. There are both internal and external reasons for the sudden rise and fall of this now troubled industry. This stuyd focuses on what went wrong within the South Korean government. It examines how the offshore-plant industrial policy has been implemented since ist inception in 2012. Using a modified versing of Matland`s Ambiguity-Conflict matrix, this study explains the way in which the combination of policy goal ambiguity and organizational conflict between and within government agencies has causeed the policy drift and failure. This study finds that the offshore-plant industrial policy has undergone three different but related stages from symbolic to experimental to political implementation over the past five years. Varying degrees of goal ambiguity and organizational conflicts have resulted in such shifts, which in turn have made the government miss the opportunities to correct earlier oplicy errors in the next stages. This study explains the unique problems inherent in the offshore-plant industrial oplicy. At the same time, it reveals the common problems prevalent in South Korea`s government -led industrial policy: the lack of planning, deliberation, coordination, and collaboration within the government, let alone outside of it.