Trilateral Development Cooperation: Power and Politics in Emerging Aid Relationships

Changes are reverberating through the international development system. This article focuses on (re)emerging development actors in the South and their role in setting agendas, challenging current aid orthodoxies, and re‐articulating development cooperation relationships between and within the North and South. Specifically, the article examines trilateral development cooperation, a significant new trend in foreign aid. The first aim is to examine the role of trilateral development cooperation in the changing geographies of development and global partnerships. The second aim is to foreground and critically evaluate the politics of trilateral development cooperation. The authors argue that trilateral development cooperation has potential to improve aid effectiveness, harness the energies and expertise of southern partners, and reshape development relations in more egalitarian ways. Alternatively, however, it may work to co‐opt (re)emerging donors into a depoliticized and ineffective aid system. While this argument has been made by many critics with regard to North–South development relations, the authors also question the projection of shared interests and essentialized developing country identities in relation to the South–South element of trilateral development cooperation. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to extend critical perspectives to all elements of the new development partnerships emerging within a rapidly changing global landscape.     

对外经济援助在战后日本国家发展中的地位

本文试图从国家发展战略的角度 ,通过对不同阶段、不同战略目标下 ,日本对外经济援助政策的特点分析 ,探讨对外经济援助在战后日本国家发展进程中的地位与作用 ,以揭示其对外援助的真实目的 ,并从一个侧面了解日本现代史的发展历程。文章指出日本对外经济援助政策的制订、实施及发展演变不但与其国家发展战略密切相关 ,而且始终是日本获取国家利益的重要工具。对外援助这种特殊的经济手段 ,在战后日本国家发展进程中起着军事力量无法替代的作用。日本之所以如此钟情于对外经济援助的“投入” ,归根结底源自于其对“产出”效果的执着追求。     

Foreign Aid,Structural Adjustment,and Public Management: The Mozambican Experience

In looking at the case of Mozambique under structural adjustment, this article argues that the particular combination of fiscal restraints imposed by financial programming, and the proliferation of decentralized project-based management, together proved to be a potent mixture which failed to reconstruct a coherent pattern of state action. The problem lies in the increasing dominance of foreign aid and in the uneasy interplay between programme aid on the one hand and project aid on the other, as competition from projects wins resources away from regular state programmes, with very little prospect of such projects becoming self-sustainable in the absence of the continued infusion of foreign aid.     

Defence and Diplomacy: The British Foreign Office and Singapore, 1939-1940

Examinations of the defence of Singapore normally focus on therole the Royal Navy and antipodean cries of betrayal. In suchstudies, great attention is paid to such matters as how longit would take the Royal Navy to relieve Singapore and the degreeto which the British government misled Australia, New Zealand,and Singapore itself with regard to London's determination todefend the fortress. This study concentrates instead on Britishdiplomacy in the Far East, and contends that Britain intendedto defend its position in the region by means of creating theimpression in Tokyo that Japan faced a loose Anglo-Americancoalition opposed to any Japanese expansionist efforts. In asimilar fashion, the British attempted also to utilize Soviet–Japanesehostility to protect their interests in the Far East. By lookingat these matters, a greater understanding of the wider aspectsof British strategic defence policy can be found.     

Foreign Aid and Economic Growth: An Empirical Analysis

After more than forty years of foreign aid programs and numerous studies of the impact aid has had on economic growth in recipient countries, the strength and nature of the aid-growth relationship is still unknown. This study contends that results from previous studies have in aggregate been inconclusive largely because of methodological limitations and that a significant aid-growth relationship does exist. Further, the nature of the relationship (for example, positive or negative) varies across the level of economic development in aid-receiving countries. The expansion method is used here to expand initial models of economic growth into models which better explain the aid-growth relationship by incorporating the relationships that aid may have with other determinants of economic growth.     

Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid

Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi-sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non-profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As these reforms weakened state capacity and liberalised economies, the downsized Madagascar and US governments became reliant on conservation actors to mobilise political support for their programs. This reinforced the need to maintain strategic relationships with capital-city actors, undermining prior efforts to devolve forest management to local communities. By isolating deforestation as a peasant problem “over there” and by expanding protected areas to meet global biodiversity targets, the conservation alliance created an avenue to be green that did not threaten extractive industries or key constituents. In this manner, saving the environment via protected areas expansion offered politicians a pathway through the inherent contradictions of green neoliberalism.