An Analytical Approach for CPS Preparation for Korea’s ODA: Focusing on Environment, Science and Technology Innovation Sector

Abstract

The Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) sets out an important milestone for development assistance. It provides the rational and guidance in overall Official Development Assistance (ODA) decision-making process at a high level from selecting priority countries, focus of assistance areas to the volume of aids. In current CPS preparation process, it involves diagnostic and analytical assessment on economic, social, security status and aspects of development ownership of the recipient country. Although not all development issues could be comprehensively covered by the CPS, the rational for priority sector selection and the process should be clearly established from its initial assessment stage and should appropriately reflect emerging and burdening development issues. This paper presented the potential for a macro-level diagnostic approach for prioritizing countries and its areas of development interests, especially in climate, environment and innovation context. With the use of aggregated country-level indicators, cluster analysis was applied to group countries by the similarities of its indicator value, and principal component analysis was conducted to identify contributing variables that best explains the attributes of each clusters. The attributes of each clusters were described and compared with the priority areas in the current CPS framework. As a result, the current framework prioritized assistance in sectors such as education, water and sanitation, transport and regional development that focuses on enhancing agricultural practices. This indicates that selection of priority sectors in the CPS preparation process should be firmly rooted in the analysis of development issues that could be initially assessed by analyzing appropriate indicators. Methodology proposed in this paper could be useful to prepare CPS in the future, additionally in the areas of environmental conservation, science and technology innovation for developing countries.