China’s Bilateral Aid to the South Pacific Region: A Constructivist Analysis

Since the early 1990s, Japan has played an increasingly important and influential role in Africa. A primary mechanism that has furthered its influence has been through its foreign aid policies. Japan’s primacy, however, has been challenged by changing global conditions related to aid to Africa, including the consolidation of the poverty reduction agenda and China’s growing presence in Africa. This book analyzes contemporary political and economic relations in foreign aid policy between Japan and Africa. Primary questions focus on Japan’s influence in the African continent, reasons for spending its limited resources to further African development, and the way Japan’s foreign aid is invested in Africa. The context of examining Japan’s foreign aid policies highlights the fluctuation between its commitments in contributing to international development and its more narrow-minded pursuit of its national interests. The contributors examine Japan’s foreign aid policy within the theme of a globalized economy in which Japan and Africa are inextricably connected. Japan and many African countries have come to realize that both sides can obtain benefits through closely coordinated aid policies. Moreover, Japan sees itself to represent a distinct voice in the international donor community while Africa needs foreign aid from all sources.

STRUGGLING FOR EFFECTIVENESS CID A and Canadian Foreign Aid Stephen Brown, ed. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queeris University Press, 2012. 384 pp, $32.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-4057-6Canadians - and scholars of Canada - have made a national pastime of assessing Canada's relative position in the world. Is Canada a power? Is Canada a major foreign policy (or development) actor? What is the future of Canada's place in the world? Struggling for Effectiveness: CIDA and Canadian Foreign Aid, edited by Stephen Brown, fits with this mode of questioning. Several of the volume's fifteen authors seek to understand Canada's relative ranking in the global foreign aid hierarchy through comparisons to donors such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Surprisingly absent from the volume are comparisons to the United States or other donors, such as Japan, who deviate from some of the standards of the international aid donor community that this volume stresses.A less-than-complete understanding of Canada as a foreign aid donor emerges from the comparative approach thatmarks the book's early chapters. While these chapters highlight the positive aspects of other countries' aid programs, the reader learns that on many indicators Canada is simply a middle of the pack country. In multiple rankings in areas ranging from donor size to generosity, Canada sits squarely in the of developed country aid donors, if not ranking slightly above the average for donor performance (53, 89, and Chapter 1). While this situation is clearly a concern for those who see foreign aid as an integral part of Canada's humanitarian ethos and believe that this ethos should define our foreign relations, it may not be a concern for most Canadians: the book provides evidence that prior to the 2000 elections only a minority of Canadians favoured increased foreign aid spending (251). This volume therefore reflects a perpetual tension between how Canadians see themselves and their country and the policies they and their government support. The domestic political context for the recent changes in Canadian foreign aid policy that form the key interest of the volume is laid out well in the chapters by David Black and Adam Chapnick.The overarching message of Struggling for Effectiveness is that Canada's foreign aid policy has lacked a clear and inspiring vision for quite some time. The result of this absence of vision has been policy incoherence, which implies that Canada will remain a middle of the pack country in the area of foreign aid for the foreseeable future. The objective of the book is twofold: to identify precisely where Canada's shortcomings lie and to offer advice and potential solutions for raising Canada from its status. While the authors largely succeed in the former task, their ability to make progress on the latter is limited by the overly critical focus of much of the volume. Indeed, the vast majority of contributors focus on policy failings since Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party came to (minority) power. Rare exceptions to this focus on Harper's failings are found in Stephen Brown's critique of the contraction of Canada's aid budget under Prime Minister Jean Chretien (95) and David Black's acknowledgement in a chapter titled Between Indifference and Idiosyncrasy: The Conservatives and Canadian Foreign Aid to Africa that the Liberals presided over the deepest cuts in the history of the Canadian aid program (248). While this book may not have been edited according to a political agenda, it certainly reflects the contentious domestic politics of Canada of the past decade.Tensions also exist between the consensus of the international aid donor community (which many of the authors in this volume use as a foil to Canada's policies) and some of the prescriptions offered in the volume. The Harper government's focus on Latin America actually reflects the current aid donor consensus that Canada should have greater geographic or sectoral concentration in its foreign aid program (53 and 90). …

Background: The Ministry of Health of Timor-Leste has realized that they should work together with other stakeholders to achieve their vision and mission due to insufficient human resources and budget. Therefore, the Ministry of Health has established collaboration with AusAid and other development partners through mechanism of coordination. However, the mechanism is not yet implemented fully. Objective: To evaluate foreign aid policy in coordinating AusAid donor and development partners to fund human resource development program (in the HSSP-SP project) through the mechanism of coordination in the Ministry of Health of Timor-Leste. Method: This was a qualitative study with a case-study design. The respondents were 16 people, consisting of 13 persons from the Ministry of Health and 3 persons from AusAid, World Bank and development partners. Result and Discussion: The Department of Partnership Management had not been optimum in managing and controlling the project/program and activities of the donors and working partners. The approved action plan and budget were relevant with the proposal made by the Ministry of Health but planning for human resource development was unclear and was not based on the work force gap faced and priority in human resource development. The project had impact on human resource development but the process of staff re-placement was not in line with the principle of the right man on the right place. Regular consultative meeting could facilitate the approval of action plan and budget for human resource development. However, the mechanism of coordination was less effective because there was no specific instrument or mechanism to do alignment and harmonization and it only focused on collective gain and there was too much pressure and demand to staff from both the Ministry of Health and partners. Constraints and challenges from political aspect and human resource capacity had hampered the process of coordinating AusAid and working partners. Conclusion: The implementation of foreign aid policy to coordinate AusAid and development partners to fund human resource development (in HSSP-SP project) following the mechanism of coordination in the Ministry of Health of Timor-Leste had run well enough but still received lack of support from human resource development planning based on institutional development. Keywords: policy evaluation, mechanism of coordination, human resource development, donor agency

This paper presents pertinent aspects of the foreign aid policy of the State of Qatar as a Muslim emerging donor with rising soft power. The study traces and explains the evolution of Qatar’s Foreign Aid Policy (QFAP) and identifies the various critical milestones of the policy that has been successfully transformed from a small Gulf Emirate into one of the leading players on both regional and global issues including aid giving. Although, Qatar’s motivation for aid giving is quite similar to the global setting, the country’s sociocultural background and values play a vital in shaping and inspiring its aid policy. As QFAP is closely tied to the country’s active foreign policy agenda, political and security motives are heavily reflected in the country’s aid practices. In collecting both primary and secondary data this study used various qualitative methods such as face-to-face interviews with key Qatari officials and scrutinized official state documents and quoted speeches, particularly of past and present Emirs as well as other archival sources.

Preface. I: Some Theoretical Aspects of Foreign Aid. 1. Foreign Aid and Employment Policies in LDCs P. Hatzipanayotou, M.S. Michael. 2. Altruism, Trade Policy, and the Optimality of Foreign Aid S. Lahiri, P. Raimondos-Moller. 3. Foreign Aid and the Welfare Cost of Inflation E. Asem, K.L. Gupta. II: Foreign Aid, Some General Policy Aspects. 4. Foreign Aid and Global Environmental Policies C. Jepma. 5. International Development Assistance and Food Security A. Matthews. 6. Is There a Link Between Aid and Trade Flows? An Econometric Investigation M. McGillivry, et al. 7. Politicising Development? The Role of Participation in the Activities of Aid Agencies H. White. 8. Technical Expertise and Indigenization L.S. Wilson. III: Case Studies: The Donor Experience. 9. Danish Aid Policy: Theory and Empirical Evidence F. Tarp, et al. IV: Case Studies: The Recipient Experience. 10. Can Aid Generate Growth in Africa? A. Bigsten. 11. Cost Benefit Analysis of Foreign Aid for a Highly Distorted Economy: The Case of Sudan K. Han, E. Tower. 12. Foreign Assistance and Development in Bangladesh A.M. Islam. 13. Main Phases and Salient Features of Turkish Foreign Aid Experience F. Senses. 14. The Macroeconomics of Foreign Aid in Sub-Saharan Africa: Dutch Disease Effects Reconsidered J. Rattso, R. Torvik. Index.

Nearly 30 years have passed since the government of Japan unveiled its first Official Development Assistance Charter. Although it sets forth fundamental guidelines for the government’s foreign aid policy, previous studies have downplayed the influence of the ODA Charter. By contrast, this study argues that the ODA Charter changed Japan’s aid allocation behavior in relation to a number of issues. First, regarding military matters: since the introduction of the 1992 ODA Charter, testing of weapons of mass destruction by developing nations, as well as military expenditures for conventional weaponry by developing nations outside of Asia, have had a negative effect on aid from Japan. Non-military cooperation with military personnel was newly introduced as a principle in the 2015 Development Cooperation Charter, and that type of cooperation increased from 2015 on, a clear indication of the influence of the Charter. Foreign aid designed to serve Japan’s own interests was first discussed in the 2003 Charter, and the proportion of that type of aid has since increased. The aims of avoiding military force and returning economic benefits to Japan, which have long had strong domestic support in postwar Japan, were seamlessly incorporated into the ODA Charter. By contrast, the aims of promoting democratization and protecting the vulnerable—international norms for foreign aid, imported from abroad—are duly set forth in the ODA Charter, which ostensibly guides Japan’s foreign aid policy, but they have had no impact on its actual aid allocation behavior.

Taiwan's foreign aid policy is largely a response to its China-imposed international isolation. Taiwan provides aid without stringent accountability conditions to countries in Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific in order to maintain official diplomatic relations in the face of Chinese opposition. Often at odds with this is Taiwan's interest in seeking western support through being seen as a responsible aid donor. Domestic political constraints on Taiwan's aid budget accentuate the tension between these two interests. Taiwan's aid program can be seen as the product of these three competing and enduring pressures – maintaining the count of official diplomatic relationships, improving its international reputation, and containing aid spending.Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's tacit ‘diplomatic truce’ with China – part of a wider warming of intergovernmental relations across the Taiwan Strait – has reduced significantly the squeeze between these three pressures on Taiwan's foreign aid policy. It has allowed the Ma administration to improve Taiwan's reputation, while maintaining or even reducing its aid expenditure, and still retain the same number of official diplomatic relationships. Nevertheless, the Ma administration has not wanted to alienate recipient governments while the prospects for the diplomatic truce with China remain uncertain. There remains considerable continuity with past practices, and the government's handling of aid as a foreign policy tool is still largely opaque and unaccountable.

Foreign aid plays an important role in promoting economic development in Africa. Recently, several countries, most notably China, have emerged as alternative sources of foreign aid. However, their motives for providing foreign aid have been questioned. The present study examines and compares determinants of China's and Japan's foreign aid allocations in Africa. It assumes that the distribution of foreign aid was determined by the aid donors’ self-interest and also by the aid recipients’ needs. Three panel model methods, namely, the pooled OLS method, the one-way fixed effects method and the two-way fixed effects methods, were employed to examine and compare the patterns of China's and Japan's foreign aid allocation in Africa. The main finding was that the provision of foreign aid by China and Japan was primarily driven by the aid donors’ self-interest. Additionally, the size of population in a recipient country was an important element to determine China's and Japan's aid allocations. The findings also suggest that Japan tended to pay more attention to the aid recipient countries’ needs as well as to the quality of governance and institutions in these countries. Overall, the findings indicate that there was no considerable difference in the motives for the provision of aid between the two aid donor countries.

Reviewed by: Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey by Elif M. Babül Elif Ege* (bio) Elif M. Babül, Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey (Stanford University Press 2017), ISBN 9781503601895, 230 pages. Building upon her seven years (2007 to 2014) of ethnographic fieldwork in human rights training programs, in her book Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey, Elif M. Babül examines the globally acclaimed concept "human rights" and its daily configurations manifested by government officials such as judges, prosecutors, police officers, prison guards, teachers, religious officials, and health care professionals. Turkey's candidacy to the European Union (EU) membership started in 1999, and from then on the country pursued the integration process to enforce the EU standards of human rights.1 The human rights training programs that Babül's book focuses on are part of this integration process. For Babül, these programs functioned as spaces of encounter between government workers and transnational human rights regimes. She convincingly argues that training programs enable the "translation"2 of the human rights standards in order to address local issues. Yet these programs also depoliticize these standards in order to navigate the "foreignness" attached to these standards in the nationalist imagery of the government workers, by redefining them as necessary requirements to achieve expertise, professional development, and good governance. According to Babül, in doing so, these training programs have failed to contest the existing authoritarian bureaucratic structures that pave the way for major human rights violations, such as ethnic violence, forced migration, and disappearances. While analyzing the training programs, Babül moves beyond the clear-cut separations of the conventional understanding of pedagogy that builds a hierarchy between the educated and non-educated, and teacher and learner. Instead, she emphasizes "dialectical encounters that generate contradiction and resistance."3 According to her, these training practices operate as "dialogical processes"4 that are full of negotiations, contestations, and uncertainties, where the government workers actively take part in challenging and reframing these supposedly "standard" universal standards in line with their local conditions, social and political interests, and "sensitivities, moralities and rationalities that shape the governmental field in Turkey."5 In this sense, her ethnographic method enables the scholar to pay special attention to the interactions and exchanges of different actors, rather than rely on a top-down analysis of human rights standards and [End Page 474] their implementations. This choice is particularly useful for the Turkish context, considering the prevalent nationalist reactions against the discourse of human rights and its European/Western "experts" that claim them to be foreign impositions. Although recently the state has undertaken the responsibility of the institutionalization of human rights discourse—through "a liberal reclamation"6—the prevalent nationalist reactionary discourse in Turkey has defined human rights as "a cover for treacherous activity against the indivisibility of the nation and the state."7 Babül contextualizes this understanding within the country's political and economic history (particularly after the 1980s coup d'etat). As a recipient of foreign aid and structural adjustment policies, Turkey has been required to follow the standards of human rights and women's rights in order to gain the necessary funds.8 As in other contexts from the Global South,9 this has created the feeling of human rights standards as being a foreign influence on the sovereignty of the state. Babül alludes to this neocolonial aspect of human rights training programs while tracing the history of the training programs in the third chapter, where she emphasizes the role played by the Western military-industrial complex in designing these training programs. However, while doing so, the scholar does not exempt the government workers in Turkey from responsibility as she successfully implements a balanced analysis that holds the government officials accountable for their human rights violations, while also emphasizing global asymmetries of power. Throughout the book, Babül underlines the ways in which these national sensitivities around human rights discourse play a role in building "bureaucratic intimacies"10 where government workers, in different levels and formats, collectively take part in conducting, sharing, and withholding "public secrets," meaning major violations of human rights, for the "continuation/perpetuity of the state."11...

For decades, agriculture has been central to economic growth and development in Pakistan. However, endemic rural poverty hinders the performance of agricultural production, and thus deteriorates the sustainable development perspectives of the agricultural sector and the entire country. The need for agricultural reform emphasizes raising farmers’ incomes as a cornerstone of the sustainable development of rural areas, and this study attempts to reveal the effects of foreign aid and government policies on the level of rural poverty in Pakistan. In total, 384 farmers from major agricultural areas of Pakistan completed the survey-based questionnaire. The partial least square structural equation modelling technique tested the results. They, using sustainable agriculture practices, improved agricultural production positively and significantly. Agriculture production positively and significantly reduces or mitigates poverty. This study aimed to reveal the role of foreign aid in sustaining agricultural production and eradicating rural poverty. Foreign aid positively moderated the association between sustainable agriculture practices and agricultural production. In addition, government policies negatively, yet insignificantly, moderate the association between agriculture production and poverty reduction. Furthermore, the findings indicate that agriculture production positively and significantly mediates the association between sustainable agriculture practices and poverty reduction. The study contributes to the literature by improving the understanding of linkages within the poverty-policies-aid-sustainability framework.

Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy. By Edward S. Mason [The Elihu Root Lectures.] (New York: Harper and Row, Inc., for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1964. Pp. ix, 118. Index. $3.50.) - Volume 21 Issue 3

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the impact of donor's fiscal status on aid decisions before and after the 2008 global financial crisis. The effects on aid can change depending on the donor country's fiscal status and the period of financial crisis. Research design, data, and methodology - A fixed effect regression and dynamic panel GMM is conducted using a comprehensive dataset combining 31 donor and 167 recipient countries during 1996-2015. The key explanatory variable is central government debt-to-GDP ratio of donor country. Recipient countries' GNI per capita, population, governance indicators, and bilateral trade-to-GDP ratio between donor and recipient countries are included as control variables. Results - We can confirm the relationship between donor country's fiscal status and aid flow. The cyclical component of government debt is found to have a negative impact on grant decisions particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis. This effect becomes larger in the countries with high government debt-to-GDP ratio. ODA decisions from the countries with low financial constraint do not significantly affected by the recipient countries' factors such as GNI, population, and governance indicator. Conclusions - Based on the empirical results of this study, the source of aid should be diversified by incorporating private sector and innovative financing sources.

The suspension of US foreign aid by President Trump in January 2025 marked a significant shock to the global aid ecosystem, raising critical questions about the behaviour of European official development assistance (ODA) donors as media coverage of the event and public opinion might affect political decision-making. Against this backdrop, we examine the German public’s opinion on the USAID shutdown and their preferences for Germany’s and the European Union’s aid policies. A rapid survey conducted in February–March 2025 (N = 1055) shows that while Germans broadly view the Trump administration’s decision to freeze US aid negatively, expressing particular concern about its impact on humanitarian issues, a substantial majority prefers no change to Germany’s foreign aid policy. Our analysis indicates that political ideology, populist attitudes and trust in the German federal government significantly shape whether individuals view the shutdown favourably and whether they support either mimicking US aid cuts or stepping in to fill the gap. By contrast, concerns about the German economy do not translate into support for foreign aid cuts.

For many years donor aid served as a key strategy utilized by wealthier nations to address the global disparities in developing world. Foreign aid was a source of financial resources for economic growth, infrastructure development and, social programs. However, in recent years, the nature of aid has shifted notably becoming an instrument with its far-reaching conditionality. Donor aid shapes policies in receiving states reflecting a more interventionist approach. Many scholars argue that donor aid paradoxically hinders recipient country´s development causing dependency and this dependency is not only economic or financial but also political. The article draws parallels between the dependency theory and donor aid. The dependency theory emerging as opposed to modernity theory in the 1950th goaled to explain underdevelopment in Latin America has maintained its relevance nowadays and re-emerged in academic discourse. In the modern era, donor aid symbolizes the dependency of Global South on Global North. While aimed at poverty reduction and promotion of economic development in recipient nations, donor aid exacerbates issues such corruption, bad governance, mismanagement of natural resources, environmental degradation and constrains their sovereignty benefiting more donor countries rather than recipient ones. Through the cases of two poorest states in Central Asia – Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the article enlightens the relationship between the dependency theory and donor aid with the special attention paid to Chinese enormous grants and loans. The research demonstrates how these two nations, due to limited resources and economic challenges, have heavily become reliant on foreign aid which in some cases hinder their sovereignty, political and economic independence.

E still have much to do to adapt our arrangements for administering foreign aid to the fact that a successful aid program must be a process of partnership. Foreign aid is not something a donor does for or to a recipient; it is some thing to be done with a recipient. This is the reason for the grow ing emphasis on self-help by aid recipients. There is by now a strong consensus?although far from complete unanimity?that foreign aid in all its forms will produce maximum results only in so far as it is related to maximum self-help. This is the opinion of leading public officials and development scholars in developing countries as well as in advanced countries. The broad concept of partnership and self-help applies to technical assistance projects, in which the purpose increasingly is to establish effective permanent institutions in the developing countries. Therefore foreign technical advice and training are made available only if those receiving aid commit themselves to establish the necessary administrative and legal framework, pro vide necessary budget funds, make available appropriate trainees and, on a specified timetable, take over full management and support of the enterprise. As for technical assistance, we need to upgrade substantially the quality of our work. Aid donors and recipients need jointly to set higher standards of excellence for their joint work. I think more needs to be demanded of aid recipients by way of serious commitment, major improvements in policies, responsibility for funding and providing personnel. And I think more needs to be demanded of aid donors: higher quality resources, applied over longer periods, with persistence, imagination and a greater sense of personal involvement and pride in the outcome. The concept of partnership and self-help applies to capital projects as well. Here, too, there is increasing agreement that completing a physical structure?a factory, a dam, a stretch of road?is not enough. What is needed in a developing country is the capacity to plan, execute and maintain capital projects, and the commitment of funds, talent and other resources to sustain them. Also, more emphasis ought to be placed on the word develop w