The Rationales Driving the Asia-Pacific States to Provide Bilateral Development Assistance to Cambodia (original) (raw)

Since the early 1990s, Cambodia has been provided with large volumes of development assistance from many nations across the globe to reconstruct its devastating economy and development after decades of civil wars and instability. To date, four Asia-Pacific states are the largest bilateral donors of development assistance to the Kingdom, namely the Japan, China, Australia, and the US. This research aims to explore the reasons why these four Asia-Pacific countries disburse the development aid to Cambodia, based on five grounds, including security interests, political interests, economic interests, socio-cultural interests, and humanitarian concern. Three major IR theories, such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism, are also implicitly employed to explain the phenomenon. The findings of this study suggest that all the five elements are the motivations for the development aid distribution from all the four donors and that all the three IR theories are applicable for the explanation of the reason why these donors provide bilateral development aid to Cambodia. However, with regard to which elements and theories matter more, it is varied accordingly to each individual donors.