Overcoming Barriers to Effective Environmental Aid: A Comparison between Japan, Germany, Denmark, and the World Bank

When developed countries started providing environmental aid to developing countries, they faced three types of barriers that made such aid ineffective: Conflicting concerns, contracting problems, and lack of capacity. Donors have responded over time with changing policy contents and implementing strategies to convince recipient countries to change their own policies. However, they have taken such steps in different ways. This article examines the ways that bilateral and multilateral donors have adjusted their environmental aid and the results of such adjustments, taking Japan as the center of analysis and comparing it with Germany, Denmark, and the World Bank. The main findings are as follows. First, to overcome the barriers, donors changed their strategy for convincing recipients to make policy change and/or shifted their focus to lower income recipients to take advantage of asymmetric power relations, whereas making minor adjustments to initial policy contents and design within the same environmental discourse. Second, responses to the barriers varied among the donors, reflecting their policy orientation in the environmental discourse, their power relationship with the recipients, and their resource mobilization capacity. Third, sustainability and enforcement of the changed policy depends mainly on the policy contents rather than on the policy change strategy.