ABSTRACT
Izumi Ohno’s assessment of ODA policies toward Vietnam and Ghana directly engages a key theme in this volume: the tension between Japan’s traditional developmentalist vision and the demands of Western donors. As a key proponent of Japan’s emphasis on growth-oriented policies, Ohno shows how Japanese ODA actors were able to work with the Vietnamese government to navigate between the different goals and expectations of aid in order to embed poverty-reduction strategies in a growth-oriented framework. She then draws on this analysis to explore Japanese initiatives in Ghana, where the terrain seems less familiar than in the Asian context that has been the heart of Japan’s most noted aid success stories.
