ABSTRACT
This volume’s perspective on transnationalism and global solutions provides a distinctive lens for the examination of environmental ODA in Derek Hall’s chapter. Hall pays special attention to the construction of the national and the transnational in debates about Japanese aid; official reports frequently describe ODA as a potential solution to transnational problems, like acid rain, while simultaneously establishing Japan’s national experience with pollution as a model for developing nations. Other countries’ putatively national (and not regional) environmental problems fall outside of these discourses, as do the potential transnational environmental consequences, both past and present, of Japan’s own industrial activity. In rethinking Japan’s environmental ODA, Hall shows how constructions of problems and solutions as transnational may provoke special tensions in debates about national economic development.
