Japan's aid diplomacy and the South Pacific

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the factors that influence and shape Japan’s official development assistance to the Pacific island countries. It is a case study of Japan’s aid diplomacy and contributes to the broader debate about what drives Japan’s aid program and how to interpret Japan’s role as an aid donor. The thesis argues that the issue of access to the region’s fisheries resources has profoundly influenced and politicised Japan’s aid relations with the Pacific island countries. But other political and strategic agendas have also shaped Japan’s aid diplomacy with the region. These motivated the Kuranari Doctrine, Japan’s major statement of principles underlying its foreign policy with the Pacific islands. Through analysis of Japan’s fisheries aid diplomacy, the Kuranari Doctrine and Japan’s approach to multilateral aid policy frameworks, the thesis shows how, over time, policies may be driven by competing interests and objectives. The study demonstrates how different aid policies may be formulated by different parts of the aid bureaucracy, often without close coordination. This analysis builds on perspectives of Japan’s aid administration, especially the bureaucratic politics approach and the ‘modified strong state paradigm’. While the former emphasises inter-ministry conflicts and rivalry, the latter stresses coordination between government and private sector interests in ODA policy. This study suggests that neither perspective, on its own, provides an adequate explanation of the economic, political and bureaucratic factors shaping Japan’s aid policies to the Pacific island countries, and the way these have changed over time. While there is close coordination between government and private sector actors in order to advance strategic economic interests, coordination within the aid administration is more problematic. The thesis challenges assumptions, implicit in much of the literature on Japan’s ODA, that there is a coherent set of aid policies and that Japan’s ODA program has evolved in a rational way from a narrow economic focus to encompass broader diplomatic and political considerations. It suggests, instead, that there are tensions within the aid program, especially between economic and political objectives. The study highlights the way the Pacific island countries have challenged Japan’s economic dominance through a combination of collective diplomacy, alliance building and exploiting international regimes (the Law of the Sea Convention). The Pacific islands case is of interest in that it shows how extreme disparities between Japan and aid recipients may be balanced, to some extent, by both bureaucratic and diplomatic factors. The study shows how Japan’s aid diplomacy has reacted to challenges and threats in the regional context, but argues that external pressures and domestic political processes may pull Japan in different directions and give rise to a disjointed, ad hoc set of aid policies. Show more