From its relatively humble beginning in the early 1980s, the Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA) China Program quickly began to set precedents in the delivery of Canadian ODA. To maximize a small budget and minimal administrative resources, CIDA's China Program introduced the mechanism of human resources development (HRD) to deliver Canadian ODA to China. This was the first significant departure in Canadian ODA which had been traditionally premised on large scale, capital intensive project funding. The unfamiliarity of China, the inexperience of Canadian executing agencies, together with this new model of development assistance were easily accommodated by the bureaucratic and administrative processes of CIDA. Though generally thought to be cumbersome and seemingly inflexible, CIDA's organizational processes were quite malleable, especially during the early stages of the China Program's implementation. The flexibility and experimentation of the early years of the program have given way, in the 1990s, to an institutionalization that has imposed greater restrictions on project development. The Chinese Enterprise Management Training Centre at Chengdu, the China Open Cities Project, and the Canada-China Lean Swine Production Project are presented as examples of the various stages of this institutionalization; as a demonstration of the building of the institutional capacity of Canadian executing agencies (CEAs) to deliver international ODA and of the increasing interdependence of CIDA and its constituency of CEAs.
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