Foreign aid is the field where social and political ideals (e.g., democracy, equality, empowerment, inclusion) have been most explicitly advocated and transferred from one country to another. However, the actual time frame of evaluating the impact of aid projects toward such goals have been limited to 5 years at best. This research examines the much longer-term impact of foreign aid with an aim to search for new reference point in understanding the social function of aid. 
 The research will specifically focus on major Japanese projects implemented in the 1980s in Southeast Asia (i.e., Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia) that were heavily criticized by the NGOs and scholarly communities as "failed projects," and investigates the "afterlife" of those projects and analyzes their long-term impact on local societies. What role those "failed projects" have played in the context of a recipient country? 
 Because foreign aid projects take place in foreign lands, interested observers must rely on media and local researchers who are biased with their own constraints and preferences. Development projects must be "communicated," but the exact mechanism of such communication has been understudied. I argue that criticism based on the assumed goal of "self-help" and "self-reliance" led the observers to ask wrong questions. By employing inter-dependency as an alternative perspective, I demonstrate how apparently "failed" projects generate positive lessons that can be applied to a wider contexts of development cooperation.
 

One of the central objectives of Japanese Development Assistance has been to promote self-reliance and capacity for self-support. However, no effort has been made to examine whether this goal has been achieved. While it is almost impossible to verify all the consequences of Japanese aid project with regard to their impact on self-reliance, it is possible to identify some basic patters. By focusing on controversial projects that had been heavily criticized by civial society and NGOs in the 1980s and 90s, the author attempted to identify the trajectory of such notoriaous projects 20 years after to find out the long-term impact of aid project to local communities.
There are three contributions from this exercise. First, there has been no previous effort to investigate the long-term effects of foreign aid that go far beyond the project period, which is usually between three to five years. Second, by conducting field-based research, I was able to identify key triggers and sequences that led one event to evolve from another, a process hard to trace if one takes a purely statistical perspective. Third, and more theoretically, aid has been narrowly defined as the extent to which it helped alleviate poverty. The central portion of Japanese aid in Southeast Asia was not targeted at poverty alleviation at all initially and, thus, it requires an alternative yardstick to measure its contribution.
The author found that most of the controversial projects, often labeled as "failed projects", turned out to be beneficial projects from the perspective of local people. The ability of aid staff, government officers, and local people to respond to criticism coming from outside was vital and invoking this change. What we found in the field is not self-reliance, which was the original objective of aid, but rather interdependent relations of people who often exert their power to adapt.