Japan’s Changing Official Development Assistance : How Institutional Reforms Affected the Role of Japan’s Private Sector in ODA Delivery

Abstract: Despite its OECD membership and transformation from aid recipient into a major donor of official development assistance (ODA), Japan has long been criticized for pursuing commercial interests through its infrastructure-focused ODA, which has heavily relied on its own corporate private sector for implementation. Throughout the last two decades, institutional reforms have altered the structure and principles of Japan’s foreign aid; yet not much knowledge has been produced on how these reforms have changed the prominent role of Japan’s private sector in aid implementation. This thesis took up this question and applied the theoretical model of the iron triangle, native to political and development studies, to first establish the internal power relations between the involved corporations, bureaucracy, and the government pre-reform. Triangulation of quantitative data from MOFA and OECD statistics with qualitative data from interviews with civilian and business professionals in ODA was then conducted to determine how the role of the private sector has changed within the triangle. Further, changes within the private sector were explored. While the ODA-affiliated firms comprising the corporate part of Japan’s private sector have become less influential as a consequence of the reforms, the civilian part has gained more weight in aid implementation.