Foreign Aid and Emerging Powers: Asian Perspectives on Official Development Assistance

269 Pages·2014·7.16 MB·English

by  Iain Watson

Foreign Aid and Emerging Powers
Current debates on emerging powers as foreign aid donors often fail to examine
the myriad geopolitical, geoeconomic and geocultural tensions that influence
policies of Official Development Assistance (ODA).
This book advocates a regional geopolitical approach to explaining donor–
donor relationships and provides a multidisciplinary critical assessment of the
contemporary debates on emerging powers and foreign aid, bringing together
economic and geopolitical approaches in the light of the 2015 completion of the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Moving away from established debates assessing the advantages and
disadvantages of foreign aid, this book challenges the current geopolitical
assumptions of the emerging powers concerning issues such as ‘South–South’
solidarity, shared development experience and ‘multipolarity’. It analyses how
donor governments ‘sell’ aid to recipients through enabling different cultural
assumptions and soft power narratives of national identity, and provides empirical
evidence on agendas such as aid effectiveness, aid for trade, public–private
partnerships and green growth aid. The text examines the role of, and relationships
between, the leading traditional and emerging-power Asian donors specifically,
and explores the different and contested perspectives and patterns of ODA policy
through an alternative account of emerging-power foreign aid to leading African
and Asian recipients.
This book provides a valuable resource for postgraduate students and
practitioners across disciplines such as development economics and geopolitics of
development, uniquely approaching the debate from the perspective of emerging
powers and donors.
Iain Watson is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Development
and Cooperation, Graduate School of International Studies, Ajou University,
South Korea. He was visiting fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and
Society (COMPAS), Oxford University, UK, from January to March 2013.
Routledge Explorations in Development Studies
This Development Studies series features innovative and original research at the
regional and global scale.
It promotes interdisciplinary scholarly works drawing on a wide spectrum of
subject areas, in particular politics, health, economics, rural and urban studies,
sociology, environment, anthropology, and conflict studies.
Topics of particular interest are globalization; emerging powers; children and
youth; cities; education; media and communication; technology development;
and climate change.
In terms of theory and method, rather than basing itself on any orthodoxy, the
series draws broadly on the tool kit of the social sciences in general, emphasizing
comparison, the analysis of the structure and processes, and the application of
qualitative and quantitative methods.
The Domestic Politics of Foreign Aid Governance for Pro-Poor Urban
Erik Lundsgaarde Development
Lessons from Ghana
Social Protection in Developing Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Countries
Reforming systems Nationalism, Law and Statelessness
Katja Bender, Markus Kaltenborn and Grand illusions in the Horn of Africa
Christian Pfleiderer John R. Campbell
Formal Peace and Informal War HIV and East Africa
Security and development in Congo Thirty years in the shadow of an
Zoё Marriage epidemic
Janet Seeley
Technology Development Assistance for
Agriculture Evaluation Methodologies for Aid in
Putting research into use in low income Conflict
countries Ole Winckler Andersen, Beate Bull and
Norman Clark, Andy Frost, Ian Maudlin Megan Kennedy-Chouane
and Andrew Ward
Digital Technologies for Democratic
Statelessness and Citizenship Governance in Latin America
Camps and the creation of political space Opportunities and risks
Victoria Redclift Anita Breuer and Yanina Welp
Governance Reform in Africa Confronting Land and Property
International and domestic pressures and Problems for Peace
counter-pressures Shinichi Takeuchi
Jérôme Bachelard
Socio-Economic Insecurity in Emerging
Economic Development and Political Economies
Action in the Arab World Building new spaces
M. A. Mohamed Salih Khayaat Fakier and Ellen Ehmke
Development and Welfare Policy in Foreign Aid and Emerging Powers
South Asia Asian perspectives on official development
Gabriele Koehler and Deepta Chopra assistance
Iain Watson
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Foreign Aid and Emerging
Powers
Asian perspectives on official
development assistance
Iain Watson
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Iain Watson
The right of Iain Watson to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Watson, Iain.
Foreign aid and emerging powers : Asian perspectives on official
development assistance / Iain Watson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Economic assistance, Chinese 2. Economic assistance, Indian.
3. Economic assistance, Russian. 4. Economic assistance, Japanese.
I. Title.
HC60.W348 2014
338.91´5–dc23 2014000432
ISBN13: 978-0-415-72707-5 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-315-85565-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
Contents
List of tables viii
Preface ix
Abbreviations xiv
Introduction 1
1 The contemporary foreign aid debate and emerging powers 34
2 International relations perspectives: emerging powers and
the contemporary geopolitics of Asia 65
3 Geopolitics and Asian donors: China, Japan and South Korea
in Africa 103
4 Asian ODA: assessing emerging donors in the Asian region 152
5 Emerging powers, Asian foreign aid and the greening
of geopolitics 186
6 From aid effectiveness to public–private partnerships:
new agendas in Asian ODA 217
7 Conclusion 244
Index 248
Tables
0.1 Top ten major recipients of individual DAC members’ aid as
a percentage of total DAC donor ODA 2001–2002 3
0.2 Top ten major recipients of individual DAC members’ aid as
a percentage of total OECD-DAC donor ODA 2011–2012 3
1.1 Top 5 recipients of net ODA per capita in 2011 47
1.2 Individual country DAC members’ net official ODA in 2012 49
3.1 Peer review of Japan’s aid: Japan’s 2010 list of top ten recipients
and gross ODA in $million 110
3.2 Japanese ODA to top five recipients classified as technical
assistance to Africa in $million 120
3.3 Total amount of Japanese ODA to sub-Saharan African top 10
recipients in 2010 in $million 120
3.4 Japan’s total bilateral disbursements of ODA to sub-Saharan Africa
from 2008 to 2011 in $million 122
3.5 South Korea’s ODA to sub-Saharan Africa between 2006 and
2010 inclusive 123
3.6 Comparison of South Korean and OECD-DAC priority sectoral aid
as a percentage of total bilateral aid in 2012 127
3.7 OECD-DAC total bilateral ODA received by sector in $million 127
4.1 Leading donors to Asian states (2010) 154
4.2 Top ODA recipients in 2011 in $million 154
4.3 Top ten net bilateral donor disbursements to Asia 2010–2011 154
4.4 Top ten donors to Asia as a percentage of each donor’s net bilateral
disbursements of ODA 2010–2011 161
4.5 South Korean bilateral ODA to Asia 2004–2008 and 2009–2010
gross disbursements in $million 176
5.1 Carbon emission ton per capita (2008); percentage of GDP for
sectors of education, health, and research and development 196
5.2 Leading countries for green patents as the average percentage of
world inventions (2002–2007) 197
Preface
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) deadline of 2015 is fast approaching
and questions are being raised as to what happens after this. Can we glean, for
instance, any indications from the current debates on aid, as to what global aid
policy (and institutions) will look like after 2015? Questions raised have been
who will be the main donors, and will we see a different aid approach, and if so,
what will it look like and contain? Initiatives such as ‘aid effectiveness’ are now,
it seems, part and parcel of what many commentators have come to regard as a
sign of a ‘new geography of aid’ or an Aid 2.0 paradigm. One of the trends over
the last few years or so has been that the MDG advocates have tended to focus
more and more on the ‘eradication of disease’ (MDG 6) as evidence of success.
Perhaps, this is because MDG 6 is relatively easy to quantify on the MDG
target ‘scorecard’. But this is not the whole story. The MDGs were, themselves,
conceived in a very different world of aid policy and underlying assumptions as
to the site and nature of development and poverty and their relationship. One of
these, a long-term assumption, was that poverty eradication would be achieved by
economic development, and that development was primarily achieved by Official
Development Assistance (ODA), and a mix of state and market policies, albeit
with different emphases by the different economic schools.
At the 2005 Group of Eight (G8) ‘Make Poverty History’ meeting, state-
led foreign aid (or ODA) was primarily regarded as the remit of the developed
nations and the ‘best’ aid came from the blue-chip Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-
DAC). Now many of these nations find themselves in a climate of economic
austerity and debt. As a result, donor governments are now rebranding their aid
as a form of ‘soft power’ to be ‘from the people’ (rather than the government) in
an attempt to justify taxpayers money going overseas and to leverage influence
over recipient nations by a narrative of ‘reciprocity’ and global ‘inclusivity’.
This of course does not mean that ‘charity stops at the borders’. On the contrary,
private donations to charities are generally stable and there is also the increasing
influence of the so-called ‘new philanthropy’ and the role of Non-Governmental
Organisations (NGOs). However, commonly held assumptions of who gives aid
and who receives aid are changing. The so-called ‘new geography of aid’ approach,
rightly in my view, moves us away from the idea that rich nations provide to poor