After "Aid" Exit: Rethinking Ownership and Sustainability in Asian Development Practices
Call for Collaborators – Panel Proposal for Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2026
📍 Vancouver, March 12–15, 2026 | Expression of interest by July 30, 2025
Organized by Aidan Huang, Tsinghua University, China
Background & Rationale
As global development architectures recede and long-standing cooperation frameworks wind down, the pressing question is no longer how external support is delivered-but what remains after it ends. Dominant approaches to "transition" often reduce sustainability to technocratic benchmarks, emphasizing policy absorption or institutional maturity-typically from the perspective of external funders.
This panel asks how Asian experiences-across political regimes, developmental histories, and sectors-can enrich our understanding of the post-aid condition. While much of Asia has engaged with and adapted external development partnerships, the ways in which these have been localized, contested, or reimagined remain poorly theorized. Moreover, several Asian countries now act as development partners abroad, raising critical questions about how they themselves imagine exit, ownership, and sustainability when acting as development partners.
We seek to use Asian experiences not as exceptional cases, but as conceptual resources for rethinking post-aid governance, South–South development epistemologies, and the politics of institutional endurance.
Panel Objectives
This panel aims to:
- Theorize ownership as a dynamic political relationship, shaped by history, institutional structures, and transnational knowledge flows;
- Interrogate sustainability beyond donor benchmarks, attending to localized practices of institutionalization, translation, and adaptation;
- Explore how countries in Asia-ranging from China and Korea to Vietnam, Indonesia, India and beyond-have navigated sustainability after development projects ended across varied domains (health, education, governance, infrastructure);
- Examine how Asian development partners approach sustainability and handover in their cooperation projects abroad (e.g. in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, etc.), including when no formal transition plans exist.
We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to:
- Case studies in Asia, including analyses of capacity-building, governance transformation, and policy retention after the phase-out of external support
- Research on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian and other Asian countries' development partnerships and their approaches to sustainability
- Comparative studies of South–South knowledge flows and project exit strategies
- Conceptual critiques of "ownership" and donor-defined sustainability
- Ethnographies of bureaucratic memory, technical practitioners, and embedded transition
This panel will appeal to scholars of:
- Development studies, political sociology, anthropology of aid
- Comparative politics of Asia and the Global South
- Postcolonial development theory and South–South cooperation
What we are looking for
We are currently recruiting:
- 3–4 paper presenters working on topics broadly related to the abovementioned themes
- 1 chair (or co-organizer), to facilitate the panel and moderate the session
- 1-2 discussant(s) (preferably early-career or established scholar), to reflect across contributions and open the discussion
Panel composition and diversity
· This panel has secured the support of a senior scholar who may serve as discussant. Their potential participation helps ensure the quality and credibility of the session.
· We are nonetheless open to interest from other faculty who may wish to serve as a discussant or co-chair, and we warmly welcome inquiries from scholars at all career stages.
· In assembling this panel, we are committed to diversity in institutional affiliation, gender, nationality, and academic rank, as encouraged by AAS guidelines. We particularly invite participation from scholars based in or working on Asia, Africa, and the Global South.
Timeline & Process
- Please express interest by Wednesday, July 30, 2025.
- We will confirm the panel composition by Friday, August 1 and submit materials ahead of the official AAS deadline (August 6).
To express interest
Please submit the following by Wednesday, July 30, 2025:
- For potential chair or discussants: A short expression of interest (2–3 sentences) describing your potential contribution to the panel;
- For potential presenters: a tentative paper title and an abstract (no more than 250 words);
- Your full name, institutional affiliation, current academic position, and contact email.
Please fill out the short form here: https://harvard.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3gZoDo3tSFOtg4S
After you submit the form, you will shortly receive a confirmation message via email.
If you prefer, you may also send your materials directly to: had23@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn or hadhuangaidan@gmail.com
Each selected participant will be kept informed at all stages, and the final panel abstract will be co-developed transparently.
Even if the panel is not accepted, or if we do not complete a full submission, this will serve as the beginning of a small, intellectually committed community around post-aid transitions and Asian development practices.
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黄爱丹 Aidan HUANG
清华大学国际与地区研究院 2023级博士研究生（社会学）
PhD student in Sociology at the Institute for International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University, China
Doctorante en sociologie, Institut des études internationales et régionales, Université Tsinghua, Chine
Visiting scholar, Department of Government, Harvard University
Chercheuse invitée, Département de gouvernement, Université
Email:
hadhuangaidan@gmail.com /
had23@mails.tsinghua.edu.cnWhatsApp: +86 151-2106-9897
WeChat: adhuang23
Linkedin:
www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-huang-iiasORCiD:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4602-3913------------------------------