2025 Volume 34 Issue 2 Pages 15-27
Behind educational aid practices lie aid agencies' “donor logic,” or underlying rationales, philosophies and motives of their aid activities. The donor logic of Japanese educational aid-or rather, educational “cooperation” as more frequently used in Japan's aid policies-has been characterized as distinctive from Western donors; the literature has delineated Japan's aid strategy as valuing recipients' ownership, equal partnerships and knowledge co-creation. Such a portrayal of Japanese educational cooperation, however, has been formed predominantly through discourse analysis and historical examination of policy documents and literature; the very presence of aid practitioners has been absented in discussing the donor logic of Japanese aid, and it is unclear whether and how these portrayals align with the aid practitioners' philosophies and motives.
This study explored the donor logic of Japanese educational cooperation from aid practitioners' viewpoints. Thirteen participants affiliated with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in different capacities and at different career stages were interviewed in a semi-structured manner. The interviews explored their lived experiences, dilemmas and rationales of how and why they practice educational aid.
Findings indicate some alignment of Japanese donor logic between previous literature and the interviewees' narratives, but they also revealed the challenges they encounter within the current aid architecture. The participants placed value on the ownership and self-help efforts of recipient countries, with Japan playing facilitative roles in helping realize their desires and priorities. This requires “doing development together” hand-in-hand to contextualize aid programs in particular countries. This way of doing educational development, nevertheless, has been in jeopardy due to budget cuts, the increasing dependency on contract-based consultants, and the demand to demonstrate measurable outcomes in the short term.
Carefully listening and analyzing practitioners' narrative may offer an alternative research approach to uncover more complex aspects of aid practice. The interview accounts in this research suggest that the approaches emphasized by Japan's educational cooperation may offer the seeds of decolonial alternatives to the dominant mode of educational development.
