Public-Private Sector Interest Coordination in Japan's ODA

Abstract

JN RECENT WORK on Japan's official development assistance (ODA), pollicy has been analyzed in terms of models of bureaucratic politics,' responses to a changing security environment,2 or responses to U.S. pressure.3 While these efforts have focused on interesting and important relationships, they have left the complex and difficult issue of governmentbusiness relations in Japan's ODA in a theoretical lacuna. Recent edited volumes on Japan's ODA suffer from the same tendency.4 This is understandable insofar as these efforts treated ODA as a traditional foreign policy area, and this approach naturally brings to the fore Japan's external political and security motivations in the formulation of ODA policy. There is no intention here to repudiate this foreign policy approach, but it can lead to mistaken assessments such as the following: [T] here is still a commercial element in some current aid programs, but such examples are now the exception rather than the rule.5 In fact, domestic structures in Japanese ODA policy making incorporate economic and commercial interests at least as much as purely diplomatic interests, and this article will draw attention to this point. Westerners who have noted the private sector role in Japanese ODA have focused on tied aid as the means of private sector inclusion.6 Tied aid is but one of a number of ways economic and commercial motivations can intrude into ODA policy, and it alone is not a reliable indicator of whether policy is strongly determined by commercial and economic interests. For example, donors such as the U.S. resort to aid tying, but this does