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This purpose of this paper is to provide the context in which this special issue is published. This special issue highlights the matters related to the Asian countries which provide assistance to developing countries for their advancement of education. There are an increasing number of donor countries which are formerly recipients of development assistance. Their emergence as donors is changing the landscape of international educational development. Being outside of the self-regulating community of traditional donors, they bring different logics and motivations to this field that often go beyond the frame of meaning making among traditional donors. Asia-Pacific region is unique in the sense that it has both traditional and new types of donors. The former group includes Japan and the USA, while the latter has Korea, China, India, and many others.

As the introduction to the collection of articles which introduce characteristics of diverse donors (traditional and nontraditional) in the Asia-Pacific region, this paper discusses first, changing the normative framework toward the target year of achieving Education for All goals, which is 2015; second, the background for the nontraditional donors to increase their presence and the changed landscape of international educational development; and third, commonalities and differences among Asian donors in terms of their philosophies, structures, and histories.

This paper maps out the locations of each Asian donors discussed in the respective country cases to follow and highlights some Asian characteristics.

The findings would hint at the presence of principles and logics of educational cooperation which cannot be fully grasped by applying widely diffused western notions of educational development.

India is described as an emerging donor. Actually India has started providing development assistance to developing countries immediately after independence. The amount of aid was relatively small, but grew over the years to a recognisable size. The purpose of this paper is to review the long experience of India in the framework of development assistance which is laid in the foundational principles of South-South Development Cooperation (SSDC).

Based on secondary data, the paper provides an exhaustive account of India's programme of development assistance, and a critical discussion of issues involved.

The analysis shows that given certain unique features of its aid programme, India has a great potential to emerge as a major donor country, and even to rank among big traditional donor countries. It can also influence the global aid architecture. There are many lessons that others can learn from the “Indian model of aid”. However, there are certain problems and challenges that India has to address for it to become a major international player in the aid business. One of the most important problems refers to the absence of detailed information.

The available details on India's assistance are sketchy and confusing; there are no detailed and consolidated statements of assistance; and it is only now a proper formal agency to coordinate all external assistance and to provide effective management in a cohesive manner has been set up.

The analytical and critical account of India's aid programme presented here is hoped to provide valuable fresh insights to the whole issue and should be of considerable academic and policy value.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate accounting and performance reporting practices embraced in the midst of a pluralistic institutional environment of an emerging economy (EE), Zambia. The research is necessitated due to the increased presence and influence of donor institutions whose information needs may not conform to the needs of local citizens in many EEs.

The study draws on institutional pluralism and Ekeh’s post-colonial theory of “two publics” to depict pluralistic environments that are typical of EEs. Primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 33 respondents drawn from the main stakeholder groups involved in health service delivery including legislators, policy makers, regulators, healthcare professionals and health service managers. Data analysis took the form of thematic analysis which involved identifying, analysing and constructing patterns and themes implicit within the data that were deemed to address the study’s research questions.

Findings indicate that Zambia’s institutional environment within the health sector is highly fragmented and pluralistic as reflected by the multiplicity of both internal and external stakeholders. These stakeholder groups equally require different reporting mechanisms to fulfil their information expectations.

The multiple reporting practices evident within the health sector entail that the effectiveness of health programmes may be compromised due to the fragmentation in goals between government and international donor institutions. Rather than pooling resources and skills for maximum impact, these practices have the effect of dispersing performance efforts with the consequence of compromising their impact. Fragmented reporting equally complicates the work of policy makers in terms of monitoring the progress and impact of such programmes.

Beyond Goddard et al. (2016), the study depicts the usefulness of Ekeh’s theory in understanding how organisations and institutions operating in pluralistic institutional environments may be better managed. In view of contradictory expectations of accounting and performance reporting requirements between the civic and primordial publics, the study indicates that different practices, mechanisms and structures have to be embraced in order to maintain institutional harmony and relevance to different communities within the health sector.

Innovation is a fundamental element for developing countries’ development. For instance, the innovation process should be integral to a country’s development plan for it to achieve high standard socio-economic development. For this reason, the global development agenda in the contemporary era underline innovation as a crucial issue to be addressed within development assistance programs. The Global North as traditional donors predominantly contend that innovation should be supported by high private sector development (PSD), and therefore, emphasizes this agenda to be delivered through their foreign aid schemes. However, this character differs considerably as compared to new emerging donors with insufficient PSD capacity, such as Indonesia. This paper aims to examine Indonesia’s technical assistance (TAC) to Timor-Leste and scrutinizes whether or not it supports the innovation development of the receiving country.

This study used a qualitative method by conducting a literature review, document tracing and depth interview with Indonesia’s South–South Cooperation National Coordinating Team.

Based on this study, it can be proven that Indonesia’s TAC has the ability to support innovation development in Timor-Leste as a least developed country. This is because Indonesia’s TAC is directed toward knowledge sharing and technology transfer that are needed by Timor-Leste. Other supporting conditions, such as similarity in the process of development, shared principles and solidarity ties among developing countries, have also created a more decent environment for aid delivery. Thus, aid initiatives among developing countries must remain to be supported as key to attain mutual progress and collective self-reliance.

This study shows that Indonesia as an emerging economic has the capability to support innovation development of other developing countries. It was a new area of study but has a lot of potential to be explored such as effectiveness and interests.

The purpose of this paper is to untangle the domestic and international factors that have affected policy making and implementation of the Japanese Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), particularly in education, at different times in its history.

The study is based on analysis of governmental policy documents and reports, minutes of ODA consultative meetings, and statistical data on Japanese financial and technical developmental assistance. The major methodology was discourse analysis of primary documents; secondary sources supplement this.

Japan was the first non-western Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) member and has always been in the ambivalent position of being both a DAC member and an Asian latecomer. As the Education for All paradigm took the ground, Japanese ODA to the education sector has shifted to the primary education from Technical and Vocational Education and Training and higher education from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. While the global trend is clear in Japanese ODA, it has always stressed the importance of establishing and demonstrating the “Japanese model” in ODA policy documents and practices. The sensitive balance between the demand to harmonize with mainstream aid modalities and the drive to demonstrate uniqueness characterize Japanese educational aid.

While many important works examined the decision-making mechanism and philosophies of Japanese educational ODA, this paper contextualizes governmental programs in the intersection between domestic factors – bureaucratic, political, and societal – and international influence. It clarifies the changing relationships between Japan and western and Asian countries in determining its agendas and directions from the 1960s to the present.

The significant impact of innovation in stimulating economic growth cannot be overemphasized, more importantly from policy perspective. For this reason, the relationship between innovation and economic growth in developing economies such as the ones in Africa has remained topical. Yet, innovation as a concept is multi-dimensional and cannot be measured by just one single variable. With hindsight of the traditional measures of innovation in literature, we augment it with the number of scientific journals published in the region to enrich this discourse.

We focus on an approach that explores innovation policy qualitatively from various policy documents of selected countries in the region from three policy perspectives (i.e. institutional framework, financing and diffusion and interaction). We further investigate whether innovation as perceived differently is important for economic growth in 25 economies in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1990–2016. Instrumental variable estimation of a threshold regression is used to capture the contributions of innovation as a multi-dimensional concept on economic growth, while dealing with endogeneity between the regressors and error term.

The results from both traditional panel regressions and IV panel threshold regressions show a positive relationship between innovation and economic growth, although the impact seems negligible. Institutional quality dampens innovation among low-regime economies, and the relation is persistent regardless of when the focus is on aggregate or decomposed institutional factors. The impact of innovation on economic growth in most regressions is robust to different dimensions of innovation. Yet, the coefficients of the innovation variables in the two regimes are quite dissimilar. While most countries in the region have offered financial support in the form of budgetary allocations to strengthen institutions, barriers to the design and implementation of innovation policies may be responsible for the sluggish contribution of innovation to the growth pattern of the region.

Segregating economies of Africa into two distinct regimes based on a threshold of investment in education as a share of GDP in order to understand the relationship between innovation and economic growth is quite novel. This lends credence to the fact that innovation as a multifaceted concept does not take place by chance – it is carefully planned. We have enriched the discourse of innovation and thus helped in deepening understanding on this contentious subject.

This explorative study aims to compare and analyze the behavior of a traditional and an emerging donor, namely, Germany and South Korea, in the field of climate change-related official development assistance (ODA). It analyzes their ODA projects in 2013 in four Southeast Asian countries severely affected by climate change, namely, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. It also adapts the existing framework to categorize ODA allocation according to receiving countries’ need and merit and donors’ self-interest.

The paper first describes both countries’ policies and activities. It then uses a country’s vulnerability to climate change as a measure of its need, its climate change readiness as a measure of its merit and its bilateral trade volume in environmental goods with donor countries as a measure of donors’ self-interest to analyze the allocation of climate-related ODA.

Results suggest that Korean ODA in the field of climate protection is driven more by receiving countries’ need and merit, but self-interest seems to be important for both donors. In addition, many projects labeled as adaptation or mitigation projects only have a weak link to these goals. There are limitations to the present paper. First, it could only analyze projects in 2013 because there are no earlier project data available in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Creditor Reporting System. Second, because of the simplifying assumptions of the need–merit–self-interest framework, possible other determinants of aid allocation were deliberately ignored. Finally, this explorative study is restricted to four vulnerable countries in Southeast Asia.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to compare a traditional and an emerging donor’s behavior and to explore the allocation of climate-related ODA using the need–merit–self-interest framework.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature addressing international aid to education, primarily focusing on China's aid principles and its practice of scholarship programs and short-term training held in higher education institutions (HEIs).

Using the systematic review approach, the authors identified 25 English-language articles in the academic databases. The review is driven by the analytical lenses of (a) the policy formulation and implementation of China's educational aid across macro-, meso- and micro-levels and (b) theories and methodologies that are commonly adopted in the existing studies.

The review identified three themes: (a) China's aid discourse in the international aid landscape, (b) critical reflections on educational aid program management and (c) international students' study experiences and perceptions of China. The authors also outline prevalent theories and methodological approaches used in the existing literature.

This literature review provides a review of research on China's international aid to education in the past 20 years, as a frequently cited example of emerging donors that have taken alternative aid approaches, thus bringing about a broader and nuanced perspective of aid to education. It also generates implications for researchers who are interested in studying education and development in the global context.

This study provides is first systematic literature review of studies on international aid to education provided by emerging donors, taking China as an example, to summarize its aid principles and aid practice in China's HEIs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of accounting in non‐governmental organisations (NGOs). It seeks to understand accounting processes and reporting practices in NGOs and the conditions that sustain those processes and practices. NGOs have become important institutions in world affairs but accounting research has not developed significant interest in their operations.

The research executes a grounded theory strategy as the principal methodology for the inquiry. Fieldwork was undertaken in three Tanzanian NGOs.

The research established the importance of accounting in the process of navigating organisational legitimacy. This was achieved due to its important role in symbolising organisational competence. Two principal strategies were employed by organisations in navigating legitimacy – building credibility and bargaining for change.

The paper makes a contribution to the limited empirical research into accounting in NGOs in developing countries and to grounded theory, accounting research. The principal finding, that in the NGOs studied the primary purpose of accounting was its symbolic use in navigating legitimacy and that it has a minimal role to play in internal decision making, is an important finding for practice as well as for understanding and knowledge. Finally, the paper sheds light on accountability in NGOs by narrating how the phenomenon is constructed and perceived by organisations and stakeholders. Future research should extend our understanding of these phenomena across a broader range of NGOs to incorporate differences in geographical location, religious affiliation and also include Northern donor organisations.

This paper aims to investigate funding and performance monitoring practices in Zambia’s health sector from an institutional and stratified ontology perspective. Such an approach was deemed appropriate in view of pluralistic institutional environments characterising most African economies that are also considered to be highly stratified.

Blended with insights from stratified ontology, the paper draws on institutional pluralism as a theoretical lens to understand the institutional structures, mechanisms, events and experiences encountered by actors operating at different levels of Zambia’s health sector. The study adopted an interpretive approach that helped to investigate the multifaceted and subjective nature of social phenomena and practices being studied. Data were collected from both archival sources and interviews with key stakeholders operating within Zambia’s health sector.

The study’s findings indicate the high levels of stratification within Zambia’s health sector as evidenced by the three sector levels that possessed different characteristics in terms of actor responses to donor influence. This study equally demonstrates the capacity of agents operating under highly fragmented institutional environments to engage in enabling and constraining responses depending on the understanding of their empirical world.

Through blending insights from stratified ontology with institutional pluralism, the study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the enabling and constraining reflexive capacity of agents to exercise choices under highly fragmented institutional environments while responding to multiple demands and expectations to sustain the co-existence of diverse stakeholders. Accordingly, the study advances thinking on the application of institutional theory to critical accounting research in line with recent ontological and epistemological shifts in institutional theory.