Public attitudes to aid in Norway and Japan

It argues that public attitudes to aid in Norway and Japan should be thought of as a product of the very different triangular relationship between the state-civil society-business in the two countries. Such an approach enables analysis of not only the current situation but also what kind of challenges the present situation poses for governments whose objectives are to continue to devote relatively high levels of government resources to ODA.

The paper focus on three "missing" dimensions to current research, which may prove to have explanatory power:

• The nature of political institutions and especially the degree of centralisation of decision-making
• The structure of society regarding its polarization, the strength of social organisations and the degree to which societal pressure can be mobilized
• The nature of coalition-building in the policy networks linking state and society

The public attitude to aid in Norway confirms the view "that there is no crisis, nor shrinking public support." This does not directly indicate that the mass public has a clear and direct impact on policy-makers. Rather, as seen in Norway, the main explanations behind the high positive figures extracted from opinion polls are to be found in the historical nature of Norwegian political institutions and the logic of coalition building in support of aid established around these political institutions. It is the centre-left coalition, in combination with an enlarged "aid complex" involving civil society organisations across a broad spectrum of the Norwegian polity (from conservative Christian groups to leftist activist groups) which explain the very positive attitude to aid in Norway. This enlarged "aid complex" is established on the background of the combined historical heritage of the missionaries and the international solidarity element in the Norwegian Labour Movement broadly defined.

The Japanese situation is very different. The high support for aid in the past seems to rest on two pillars: the economic miracle and that it was communicated to the public as a policy tool for the promotion of strategic national interests; from mending political ties with Southeast Asian nations in the 1950s, to the economic co-operation programme in the 1960s with the explicit goal of export promotion to the strategic aid policies of the 1970s and 1980s aimed at securing markets and resources/energy deliverance. The rationale for giving aid was not tied to historical processes in Japanese society or attempted embedded into Japanese civil society until very recently. This implies that the consensus on ODA and support for it that existed during the 1970s and 80s was quite hollow. The idea about aid was never really cemented into society, and it was therefore easily washed away when two factors emerged in combination; (1) the perception of a permanent economic crisis, and (2) the inability of Japanese policy-makers to communicate in a coherent and legitimate manner a new aid rationale for Japan.

This implies that whereas the main task for policy-makers in Norway that seek to maintain public support for aid is to work continuously for the maintenance of the enlarged Norwegian "aid complex" and the centre-left coalition that it is built upon, the main task for Japanese policy-makers with the same objective would be to create such a coalition and an enlarged "aid complex," and based on this define a new aid rationale for Japan that can be communicated to the public in a credible, coherent and legitimate manner.