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

Current debates on emerging market donors fail to consider the strategic tensions and paradoxes for these donors and the tensions and contradictions of economic and geopolitics relations between BRIC and N-11 donors which directly and indirectly affect their policies of Official Development Aid (ODA).

This book provides a multidisciplinary assessment of the contemporary debates on foreign aid. Covering the key debates of foreign aid, the book brings together economic and geopolitical approaches to the issues in the light of the 2015 completion of the Millennium Development Goals. The book argues that the foreign aid debate and agenda-setting is impacted upon by the new geopolitical role of emerging power donors and in particular those donors who themselves once received foreign aid. This is generating new dynamics as to questions of aid effectiveness, agendas of capacity building, encouraging private and public partnerships, aid and equal south-south trade relationships in the post-2015 era. However, rather than focusing on issues of agenda and intentions as is the case in recent literature, the book also considers the emerging tensions within the donors community from a geopolitical perspective and the impact of these tensions on ODA. The book examines the intentions and motivations of East Asian donors specifically and considers whether a new aid paradigm is empirically emerging and how feasible this might prove to be. It also explores the issues of domestic support at home linked to questions of emerging nation and middle power national identity.

This book uniquely approaches the debate on foreign aid from the perspective of emerging powers and donors, and thus makes an important contribution to the study of foreign aid that has been dominated by the discourses surrounding traditional donors.