December 20, 2019
JICA Research Institute (JICA-RI) research project "Japan’s Development Cooperation: A Historical Perspective" aims to objectively and empirically analyze the 60-year history of Japan's development cooperation from a variety of angles. The research results will be compiled into seven (Japanese-language) books.
Background paper No. 9, "The Historical Development of Japanese ODA Policy in the OECD: A Corpus Analysis of DAC Aid Reviews" (by Yu Oliver Maemura), which provides useful knowledge, materials and information for this research project, was recently published in English only.
This paper provides a discussion on the historical development of Japanese ODA policy and practice through a linguistic study of policy documents. The study applies corpus linguistic methods to analyze OECD-DAC Annual Aid Reviews to reveal patterns within relevant texts over three decades (from 1962 to the 1990s). Observations of linguistic patterns are used to generate policy discussions in tandem with existing literature on international development aid.
Background papers 1 to 8 also have been published, in Japanese. You can see No. 9 from the following related links.
JICA-RI will continue publishing background papers.