Is Anyone Listening?

by Anne Winter

Table of Contents

• AUTHOR'S PREFACE
• COMMUNICATING DEVELOPMENT: PAST AND FUTURE
• PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
• PRINCIPAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR THE PUBLIC
• IMPLICATIONS FOR AGENCY COMMUNICATIONS: NEW APPROACHES AND EMERGING TRENDS
• SOME CONCLUSIONS

PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

Public Opinion and Trends in Development Assistance

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), official development assistance (ODA) from members of its Development Assistance Committee (DAC) slumped from US$60.8 billion in 1992 to US$56 billion in 1993, an unexpected and unprecedented six percent decline in real terms.2 With only four in 21 DAC members reporting increases in current dollar terms in 1993, the ODA share of their GNP fell to 0.3 percent, the lowest level recorded in twenty years.3

Speculation continues over whether this decline represents an aberration or the initial stages of a more permanent downward trend. Donors themselves largely attribute these cuts to sluggish domestic economies and competing priorities, while stressing the overall growth in private resource flows to developing countries. However, private resource flows are heavily concentrated on relatively few large economies and emerging markets, and largely by-pass the poorer countries that remain dependent on declining aid resources.

International support for development efforts is also threatened by changes in the use of aid. Long-term development assistance still takes the lion's share, but is decreasing relative to short-term emergency aid. The optimism that surrounded the end of the Cold War and anticipation that a 'peace dividend' would be available to fund global development has vanished abruptly, as emergency assistance--which represented some US$300 million current dollars in the early 1980s--became a US$3.2 billion claim on bilateral aid budgets in 1993. As DAC Chair James Michel has warned, "The present situation could degenerate into a vicious circle. The risk is that stagnant aid budgets will provide inadequate resources to address effectively the issues of sustainable development while complex emergencies proliferate, further diminishing resources available for longer-term development efforts. Disappointment over limited progress could lessen confidence in the effectiveness of development cooperation, reducing support for restored aid levels."4

Concern about aid levels and government support for international cooperation has led to debate over the extent to which this decline can be attributed to lack of public support for global development concerns. This begs the question of the potential impact of public opinion on political decision-making.

It is widely taken as axiomatic that there is a close correlation between expressed public support for aid and government spending on it. But evidence for this is in fact less than clear.5 Two recent examples may illustrate the point. The increased support for aid recently recorded among the Norwegian public has not inhibited the Norwegian government from reducing its aid budget over the past few years. In contrast, the Japanese government has expressed its intention to increase significantly its aid budget over 1993-97, despite low public support in Japan for increased ODA.

Rather than Japanese public opinion being a lever for government action, it is instead the government that is taking a leadership role in organizing a concerted campaign to build support for its own aid programme. In other countries, studies have also periodically documented the fact that the 'leaders' of society, and more specifically the foreign policy elites, are more well-disposed towards development cooperation than is public opinion, making the question of public influence on favourable political decision-making a moot point.6

Given situations such as these, some have questioned whether it is necessary to attach so much significance to what the public thinks. Why does it matter what people, who are in any case unfamiliar and ill-informed about many aspects of the issues concerned, have to say about them? However, the above example of Japan illustrates government recognition that public opinion should at least be in tune with its chosen political orientations. Others have noted that, for example, while interest or lobby groups are themselves a source of influence on public attitudes, they are also a reflection of the societies in which they operate; their impact derives from the response that their espoused causes receive from the public at large.7 In other words, while public opinion might not always be the lever it is assumed to be, governments and aid agencies in democratic societies cannot afford to discount non-specialist opinion. As a minimum condition, they should aim to ensure that the issues they are promoting are not at total variance with the prevailing social climate.

Measuring Public Support

Where, then, does the public stand on international aid and cooperation issues? In general terms, opinion surveys continue to record broad public sympathy for development cooperation in most industrialized countries. However, there has been increasing gloom and doom in development circles over apparent indications that public support for aid may be beginning to decline. Recent polls in countries such as Finland have indicated a deterioration in public support for aid.8 In Japan, a survey by the Office of the Prime Minister in 1993 showed that public support for increased economic cooperation was at its lowest ever, while the percentage of respondents calling for its reduction was higher than ever. These figures showed slight improvement in 1994.9 In the United States, a 1993 poll conducted for The Rockefeller Foundation10 showed support for aid among young adults had fallen from about 61% in 1986 to 34% in 1992, and that 58% of this group was actively opposed to sending assistance. At the same time, support for aid has appeared to be increasing in other countries: a 1993 poll in Norway showed 85% of people polled approved of aid--the highest percentage since 1986, and in The Netherlands record support levels for aid were also registered in 1994.11

Public Opinion Surveys: What Do They Really Mean?

What is the significance of these findings and what do they really mean? Polling professionals broadly concur that a certain degree of caution needs to be shown with regard to the insights that can be gained through data collection techniques of this type. Potential sources of error reside in the sampling and processing methods used, as well as the precise formulation of terms and variables, which for the purposes of comparative analyses may result in varying degrees of incompatibility and apparently conflicting results. Even where this is given express consideration, the extent to which opinion polls can reflect spontaneous interest is a matter of debate, as is the level of correlation between statements of attitude and motivation, and resultant behaviour.

Evidence of ambivalent and contradictory attitudes to development cooperation in a large number of polls has led many analysts to conclude that the broad public sympathy expressed for aid does not amount to real or committed support. Rather, it appears in many cases to be patently superficial: a 1992 survey by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)12 showed that almost one in two Canadians had very weak opinions on their government's aid programme. Even among the group that expressed 'very strong support' for the programme, the level fell by a third when they were asked to bear in mind their own government's deficit.

In the most recent survey on public attitudes commissioned by the European Commission,13 four in five respondents stated that they considered helping poor countries in the Third World to be 'very important' or 'important.' but when asked which of nine issues they considered important problems, 'helping poor countries in Africa, South America and Asia' came second to last, well behind unemployment, the environment, and terrorism.

Publics in major donor countries have little knowledge of development issues. They are broadly speaking unfamiliar with many of the basic facts about international aid, and even with many of the concepts used by aid agencies. In one study undertaken with schoolchildren in the United Kingdom,14 one-third had no notion of the meaning of the 'Third World'--some thought it referred to the after-life, while others thought it was out in space and mentioned meteors and 'Star Wars.' Those familiar with the term associated it exclusively with countries that suffered from severe drought and famine and relied on Western charity to prevent mass starvation.

People have very little idea how much money is allocated to aid programmes, or how and by whom it is spent. According to one UNICEF survey,15 most Americans believe that about 16% of their federal government's budget goes to helping people in poor countries. In reality, the figure is some 0.2%. In another survey by CIDA,16 only 10% of respondents could identify the agency as the entity responsible for Canadian aid. Other responses ranged from UNICEF to McDonald's. At the same time, questions that suggest aid may be misused or ineffective draw a great deal of support: 83% of respondents in a 1995 survey in the United States agreed with the statement that "there is so much waste and corruption in the process of giving foreign aid that very little aid actually reaches the people who really need it,"17 a finding echoed by 81% of Canadians in another recent poll.18

Professed public sympathy for international cooperation is also qualified by the very negative images that dominate public opinion in almost all industrialized countries. Over 80% of Europeans have never had direct experience of the developing world, and most readily admit that virtually the only things they hear about developing countries are disasters and revolutions; 60% of Italians think there are many people dying of hunger in Brazil, and even in Denmark, where people tend to be more sympathetic to the situation of the developing world than in many other countries, only one in six consider India a country that is developing. Indeed it is widely thought of as a country of mass starvation.19 In short, the images that are prevalent in the public mind are that the developing world is in chaos and poverty, largely because of ignorance and bad weather. People who live there are thought to be starving, sick, unskilled, and unable to help themselves.

According to some studies, beliefs that developing countries are devastatingly poor are so deeply anchored in some cases that people are inhibited from accepting evidence to the contrary as an objective reality. In a study in the United Kingdom,20 schoolchildren were shown photos of different scenes in developing countries. When confronted with a photo of the airport in Nairobi, they were incredulous that the scene was in Africa, despite the absence of any white people. They could not believe affluence existed in a region where they thought people were queuing for food in little bowls. Similar results were found in a study with adults in the United States.21 Here again, it was found that participants' receptivity to perceptions of the developing world that challenged their preconceived notions was very low. Respondents were asked how they would feel if they saw success stories rather than bad news about the developing world. A large majority was not interested in successes in the Third World: they already 'knew' there was not a great deal of success to report.

So why have attitudes inhibiting support for international cooperation apparently persisted at similar levels in nearly all industrialized countries? And why do people remain so relatively unreceptive to the information provided by aid agencies and others on the developing world?

Aid agencies are realizing that in devising their communication strategies, they have largely failed to take into account people's most basic beliefs about their national identities, about things 'foreign,' and about other countries. In promoting international cooperation, agencies are frequently asking people to reconsider very fundamentally their values, and to change deep and long-held beliefs about other peoples and societies, beliefs that are constantly being reinforced by the stereotypical images found in the media.

As shown above, it is one of the most well-documented findings in social science that people's perceptions are unconsciously but very significantly influenced by their beliefs. Even when confronted with facts that uphold the contrary, people's beliefs tend to remain intact--for the simple reason that in processing information they tend to discount that which does not fit into their ready-made systems. As Eliot Aronson said in his analysis of the failure of anti-racist campaigns in the United States in the 1950s, "Information campaigns fail because people are inclined not to sit still and take in information that is dissonant with their beliefs."22

So, continuing to simply provide information to audiences without seeking to challenge their more fundamental assumptions is unlikely to result in any significant shift in public opinion in the immediate future. Unless a concerted effort is made to strengthen receptivity to new information and to improve public debate on the issues of international cooperation, the public opinion surveys ten years from now will, in all probability, not reflect an appreciable advance on the levels of interest and views shown today.