Translating Sustainable Development: The Greening of Japan's Bilateral International Cooperation

Soyeun Kim
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Soyeun Kim: Soyeun Kim is currently a Research Associate at White Rose East Asia Centre, University of Leeds and a Sessional Lecturer in Development Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her current research interests are mainly in the political ecology of development cooperation/intervention, with a particular focus on the East Asian donors (including Japan, China and South Korea) and the Southeast Asian recipients. She also works as an independent consultant and a Corporate Social Responsibility analyst in London.

Global Environmental Politics, 2009, vol. 9, issue 2, pages 24-51

Abstract: This article considers how the sustainable development paradigm of the 1990s has been transferred from Western donor circles to a non-Western donor, Japan, and has been "translated" in the implementation of Japan's international cooperation policy. In so doing, the article discusses issues of "greening" with relation to foreign aid, and more specifically Japan's bilateral international cooperation. It highlights how dynamics of cultural politics specific to an individual country (i.e. Japan) condition the ways in which its perception and practice of "sustainable development" unfold across time and space, and between a multitude of state and nonstate actors that crisscross national boundaries. Such conditions, in turn, emphasize the importance of understanding different ways of institutional learning (or adaptation) in Japan's international cooperation system for dealing with the socio-environmental aspects of its projects. (c) 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009

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