New Reports

South Korea’s ODA Policies at a Crossroads: A New Political Opportunity for Institutional Reforms

Author: Taekyoon Kim
Publisher: KOICA(Korea International Cooperation Agency)
Date: May 16th, 2017

Under the grand transformation of global governance for development cooperation, the “Korea Aid’ program is at risk. Korea’s ODA policies have been suffering in the wake of the internally appalling 2016 political scandal and the chronic misalignment of grants and concessional loans, embedded in the fragmented structure of aid delivery systems. So Hopes for the SDGs increases but People’s distrust in Korea Aid is being disseminated. Now It is our priority to set for clear philosophical principles that justify why Korea Should provide foreign aid at all. And this paper covers how to set for clear aims and implement ODA.

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Incorporating Climate Change Adaptation into Sustainable Development

Author: Hanna Yim
Publisher: KOICA(Korea International Cooperation Agency)
Date: June, 2017

Climate change adaptation is still smaller size at global level but it has high potential to maximize its positive impact by connecting diverse relevant sectors. Overall trend in Korea’s aid as well as KOICA’s support in terms of budgeting larger volume has been allocated to climate change adaptation than mitigation. KOICA’s adaptation support is highly concentrated to a few of particular sectors. This would be a challenging factor to diversify KOICA’s adaptation mainstreaming. KOICA then needs to explore sectoral adaptation measures. Such measures are already available and introduced in policy dialogue as well as at practical level particularly by other donor agencies as well as UNFCCC and IPCC. By referring to practices of other adaptation oriented DAC members having balanced portfolio, KOICA is expected to learn how to advance its adaptation approach in their project designing.

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Aid Fragmentation and Effectiveness: What Do We Really Know?

Author: Kai Gehring, Katharina Michaelowa, Axel Dreher, Franziska Spörri
Publisher: Elsevier
Date: June 20th, 2017

Aid fragmentation is widely recognized as being detrimental to development outcomes. We reinvestigate the impact of fragmentation in the context of growth, bureaucratic policy, and education, focusing on a number of conceptually different indicators of fragmentation, and paying attention to potentially heterogeneous effects across countries, sectors, and channels of influence. Our systematic and detailed reexamination of existing empirical studies shows that this differentiation is crucial. In some sectors—such as primary education—donor concentration or limiting donor numbers appear to be detrimental rather than beneficial for development outcomes. In other areas, we find the expected negative effect, but only when we conceptualize fragmentation as a lack of lead donors (too limited concentration), rather than in terms of donor numbers.

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Does Development Aid Work?
Improving Aid Effectiveness in International Development Cooperation Efforts

Author: Soo Bong Uh and Md. Roknuzzamn Siddiky
Publisher: Bangladesh Sociological Society
Date: July, 2017

The paper attempts to examine the role of development aid to achieve its intended development outcomes and look at present discourse on aid effectiveness. The study is mainly qualitative in nature involving document analysis method, and qualitative interviews with a total of 12 concerned officials from Korea and Bangladesh dealing with Korea’s ODA programs. The paper suggests that whereas development aid has worldwide mixed development outcomes, it may work better, if both the partner countries – developed and developing – follow the core values of the partnership-based approach and exercise the practices of good governance in development cooperation. Moreover, building absorptive capacity and supportive government’s policy to utilize TC programs are pivotal to improve aid effectiveness.

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Transforming smallholder agriculture to achieve the SDGs

Author: Mathew Abraham and Prabhu Pingali
Publisher: New York: Springer.
Date: August, 2017

The aim of this book is to identify the various challenges of small farm economies at various stages of structural transformation and the major interventions that are needed to improve their productivity in the context of meeting the SDG of ending poverty and ensuring prosperity for all. In the first part of the chapter, we identify the various goals of the SDGs that explicitly depend on small farm growth to be achieved, bringing to light the importance and urgency of interventions in small farm production systems. In the second part of this chapter, we look at the major characteristics of low-productivity agricultural systems. In the last part, using a transaction cost framework, we try to understand the major challenges small farms face in different production systems and we explain how these challenges may hinder farm viability.

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Linked sustainability challenges and trade-offs among fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture

Author: Blanchard. JL, Watson. RA, Fulton. EA, Cottrell. RS, Nash. KL
Publisher: Macmillan
Date: September, 2017

Here, we assess and highlight development challenges for fisheries-dependent countries based on analyses of interactions and trade-offs between goals focusing on food, biodiversity and climate change. We demonstrate that some countries are likely to face double jeopardies in both fisheries and agriculture sectors under climate change. The strategies to mitigate these risks will be context-dependent, and will need to directly address the trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals, such as halting biodiversity loss and reducing poverty.

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