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

SOME CONCLUSIONS

While individual agency activities and campaigns can achieve much, building public support for international cooperation, the debate with the media over coverage of agency concerns, and the self-regulation of agency communication practice are common responsibilities that must be addressed jointly and urgently by the international community if progress is to be made towards some of their objectives.

In recent years, a considerable number of individual initiatives and research projects have been undertaken at different levels and in different countries in an effort to better understand public attitudes to development cooperation and to identify the primary obstacles to support for development concerns. However, at the international level, relatively few attempts have been made to obtain the continued involvement of expert and public opinion in the developing world in devising communication strategies for audiences in the donor countries. There is a need to bring together existing knowledge and experience in this complex field, making them readily accessible and immediately useful to those involved in the communication of international issues on a daily basis; to pool some of the available resources for research and to cofinance activities of mutual interest to agencies; and to mount common strategies to promote more effective and ethical communication practice. The time has come to address these issues more systematically and to initiate a collaborative effort that has effective international outreacy and participation.

But beyond this, the time has also come for the aid community to channel its collective uneasiness into a positive and active effort, not only to rethink the nature of its involvement in promoting international cooperation, but also to achieve consensus around new orientations. As the dreams of development have essentially dissipated into an amorphous mass--a stream of good intentions trickling everywhere and nowhere--there has been increasing debate and reflection about the need to abandon traditional perceptions and methods of intervention. There is now a need to develop a conceptual framework that better reflects the new paradigms. Within this context, the role of communicators in burying the epoch of development and humanitarianism and in animating a new public debate around the limits and potential of international cooperation is essential. If the development dodos are not to face extinction, they must lay new eggs--and too bad about the ruffled feathers.

References

1. The Development Dictionary--a guide to knowledge and power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, Zed Books Ltd, London and New Jersey, 1992, pp.1-5.

2. Development Co-operation, 1994: Efforts and Policies of the Members of the Development Assistance Committee, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, 1995, p.73.

3. Ibid, p.2.

4. Ibid, pp.2-3.

5. Tony German, Who shapes and leads public attitudes on development co-operation?, background paper for the Joint DAC/Development Centre Informal Experts' Consultation, OECD, Paris, 24-25 October 1994.

6. See for example Everett Carll Ladd, American opinion on issues of foreign assistance (unpublished paper).

7. Peter Willetts, The impact of promotional pressure groups on global politics, in Pressure groups in the global system, the transnational relations of issue-oriented non-governmental organizations, edited by Peter Willets, Global politics series, Frances Pinter Publishers, London 1982.

8. The reality of aid 95, Earthscan Publications Ltd., London 1995.

9. Office of the Prime Minister, Public opinion poll of Japanese diplomacy, Tokyo, 1993 and 1994.

10. Americans and Foreign Aid in the Nineties--report of findings from a national survey on foreign economic assistance, conducted for The Rockefeller Foundation by Belden and Russonello, Washington D.C., February 1993.

11. The reality of aid 95, ibid.

12. Data from CIDA. Analyzed in Evan Browne, "Looking for support in all the right places: public opinion and international aid," in Development, Journal of the Society for International Development, 1993:3, Rome, 1993.

13. The way Europeans perceive the Third World in 1991, report produced by INRA (Europe) for the European Commission, 1992.

14. A. Summers, Third World Survey, Craigmiller, (unpublished paper).

15. Louis Harris Opinion Poll undertaken for the United States Committee for UNICEF, December 1992.

16. Data from the Canadian International Development Agency, 1988.

17. Americans and Foreign Aid: a study of American Public Attitudes, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, a joint program of the Center for the Study of Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies, Maryland School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, January 1995.

18. Public Attitudes towards International Development Assistance 1991, report to the Canadian International Development Agency.

19. The way Europeans perceive the Third World in 1991, ibid.

20. Janet Graham, Susan Lynn, "Mud huts and flints: children's images of the Third World," Education, 3-13 June 1989.

21. Beldon and Russonello, Attitudes toward the Third World, its people, and efforts to aid development, survey conducted for The American Forum for Global Education, Washington D.C., 1989.

22. Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, W.H.Freeman and Co., New York, 1988, p. 266.

23. Quoted in Mort Rosenblum, Who stole the news?: why we can't keep up with what happens in the world and what we can do about it, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York, 1993, p.9.

24. Bruno Carton et Violaine de Villers, "L'Afrique dans les représentations des médias," La Nouvelle Revue, juillet-août 1988, p.92.

25. Institut für Entwicklungsforschung, Wirtschafts und Sozialplanung (ISOPLAN), interim report on survey of press clippings produced around "Africa Day," Saarbrucken, November 1986.

26. Barosud--L'image du tiers monde dans les médias, Commission Coopération Développement, Ministère de la Coopération et du Développement, Paris, 1992.

27. Adrian Cleasby, What in the world is going on? British television and global affairs, Third World & Environment Broadcasting Project, Oxfam Publishing, Poole, December 1994.

28. Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, public discourse in the age of showbusiness, Viking Penguin Inc, New York, chapter 5.

29. Quoted in Nicholas Fraser, "Conflict of interests," The Sunday Times, 24 July 1994.

30. Anne Applebaum, "How to make a billion and bring peace on earth," The Spectator, London, 14 May 1994, pp.8-10

31. Ibid.

32. Timothy Weaver, "Prostituting the facts: aid and the media," Crosslines, Geneva, April-May 1995, p.20.

33. John Ryle, "City of Words", The Guardian, 29 September 1995.

34. Quoted by Paddy Coulter in Broadcasting about Africa, report of the 1994 Annual Conference of the One World Broadcasting Trust, London, 1994, p.41 (unpublished paper).

35. Richard Behar, "SCF's little secret," Forbes, 21 April 1986.

36. "You call it charity, I call it interference," James Fenton, The Independent, 15 February 1993.

37. Alan Radley, Images of development and their implications for fund-raising, report for UNICEF, University of Loughborough, Loughborough, June 1994 (unpublished paper).

38. Daniel Yankelovich, Public Judgment on Development Aid, background paper for the Joint DAC/Development Centre Informal Experts' Consultation, OECD, Paris, 24-25 October 1994, pp.7-8.

39. Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment--making democracy work in a complex world, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, 1991, p. 24.

40. Daniel Yankelovich, Public Judgment on Development Aid, ibid., p.15.

41. Stephen Bochner, The social psychology of cross-cultural relations, Cultures in contact, studies in cross-cultural interaction, edited by Stephen Bochner, International series in experimental social psychology, vol.1, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1982, p.23.

42. Findings in this and the following sectors based on Communication for development in an international context: a review of its current status, emerging trends, and the potential for co-operative activities between agencies and with external partners, report prepared for UNICEF with assistance of Media Natura (London and New York), Hans Olsen and Dominique de Santis, August 1995 (unpublished paper).

43. Quoted in Edward Girardet, Humanitarianism, development and public awareness: new approaches toward a more effective media strategy, report for UNICEF, April 1993 (unpublished paper).

44. "BBC under fire at Edinburgh," The Observer, London, 29 August 1993, p.3.

45. "Too many bullets in the bulletins," The Independent on Sunday, London, 25 April 1993.

46. Edward Girardet, ibid.