Approved by the OECD Ministerial Council in May 1996 and "welcomed" by the Lyon Summit the following month, the new development strategy (as formally put forward in the paper, "Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation") has been gathering recognition as a set of respectable fundamental guidelines for international development assistance. The Birmingham Summit in May 1998 reaffirmed and highlighted the new strategy's significance and expressed the intention to put it into action.

Principled as it is upon the notions of developing country "ownership" and donor country "partnerships," the new strategy defines a set of tangible targets for achievement within specific time frames. ²⁵

The current challenge for donor countries and recipient countries is how they will formulate concrete measures to achieve these goals. One target the new strategy sets, for example, is that of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015. To achieve this goal, though, it will first be essential to monitor various development indicators and come up with strategic initiatives for action. As a first step, DAC, the UN, and the World Bank have begun their joint work to develop a set of basic indicators of (degrees of poverty, literacy rates, etc.) considered essential to the task of measuring poverty and other factors relating to development.

Though Japan played a leading role in formulating the new development strategy, it must continue to assume a leading role in the implementation of the strategy. For that purpose, in June 1998 it hosted a Tokyo conference and assorted seminars in the interest of fostering a broader awareness of the ideas behind the strategy among members of the developing world, and seeking measures with other countries through policy dialogues to translate the strategy into action. It has also been working to implement the strategy through stronger efforts in field-level aid coordination with other donor countries.

However, ownership by the developing countries themselves must be respected above all, for it is their ownership of the development process that will ultimately decide whether the strategy is a success. Realistically, though, this will prove easier said than done. The Second Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD II) ²⁶ turned out to be an important occasion in this respect. The new development strategy, including its principles and its targets, formed the basis of the Tokyo Agenda for Action adopted at TICAD II.