Policy-Oriented Research

Research projects from JFY 1994 continued to reflect CGP's priority on issues of the Asia-Pacific region, a geographic area of both great diversity and growing influence on the world environment. CGP encourages institutions in the US and Japan to develop multilateral research projects that focus on the crucial policy issues of this emergent region. In the Asia-Pacific context, grantees in the past fiscal year focused on such issues as harmonizing legal systems and competition policy in the nations of the Asia-Pacific region; developing cooperative strategies for Official Development Assistance (ODA) for the US and Japan; and the impact of regionalization on potential trading relationships between Asia and Latin America.

Multilateral organizations were also a key issue for JFY 1994 grantees, as the approaching 50th anniversary of the United Nations charter brought its future to the forefront of attention. The Japan Institute for International Affairs, a Tokyo-based research organization, joined with scholars at Columbia University to examine ways in which the US and Japan could practice joint leadership in strengthening the UN system, while the International Cooperation Research Association, a Japanese NGO associated with the United Nations University in Tokyo, devoted the third year of a three-year project with the US-based Academic Council on the UN System to an evaluation of the UN and Bretton Woods Institutions' success at ensuring "human security," through promoting sustainable development, human rights, and relief for displaced populations. The Research Institute for Peace and Security in Tokyo and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace completed a two-year project on peacekeeping operations, which attempted to develop a standardized approach to regional conflicts and civil and ethnic strife within nations, while balancing these issues with questions of national sovereignty.

An encouraging sign during JFY1994 was the effort of grantees to draw broader, comparative perspectives into their analysis of contemporary policy issues. The University of Tsukuba, in collaboration with the Council on Foreign Relations and the University of Toronto, focused on dispute settlement in US-Japanese trade and investment relations from an outside perspective that of Canada. Examining the ways in which Canada, itself a major partner in transpacific economic relations, manages its trade disputes with the US through agreed settlement mechanisms, a trinational group of researches sought to explore the applicability of these systems to the US-Japan relationship.

The Japan Research Institute initiated a three-year project on economic relations in the global market, attempting to reconcile the sources of friction among developed nations, as well as establish a normative approach to the integration of developing nations into the world economy. In developing and implementing the project, the Tokyo-based research organization obtained the cooperation of three separate institutions: the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in the US; the Royal institute of International Affairs in England; and the Hamburg Economic Research Institute in Germany.

In addition to the qualifications of the participants and the depth of their collaboration, these projects merited CGP support on the strength of their methodology and project structure. The time lines of these projects follow a careful succession of preparatory meetings and workshops at which the participants hone their ongoing research, and in many cases exchange ideas with outside experts as well. Despite similarities between the overall themes of some projects, each one represents a discrete and focused branch of inquiry, and represents the result of a solid knowledge of existing efforts in the field. Finally, each grant has resulted in bi- or multilingual publications of the results, and includes a sharply defined plan of dissemination to governments and policy-making institutions for its jointly conceived policy recommendations.