McLeod Group Blog by Betty Plewes and Rieky Stuart, July 19, 2016
Global Affairs Canada has launched consultations to rethink Canada’s international assistance policies and programs in order to respond better to current global challenges. What is not on the agenda can be as important as what is there. Notably, there is a glaring absence of discussion about how to engage the Canadian public on development issues.
Underpinning the role of Canadian ministers and public officials working on global issues there needs to be an informed and engaged Canadian public. An informed citizenry provides support for an active, engaged Canadian foreign policy, but engaged individuals also address global issues in a variety of other ways, through their unions, churches, civil society organizations (CSOs—also known as NGOs) and communities. For example, the recently adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have very ambitious targets that cannot be met by governments alone.
Currently Canada’s role in international development is ill served by an old-fashioned storyline focused primarily on ‘aid’ and ‘helping’. Aid (or development assistance) is an important lever in exercising our commitment to the global good, but genuine development cooperation includes a wider spectrum of issues, including peace, democracy, level playing fields in international trade and investment, and environmental sustainability.
Poll after poll show that while there is broad support from Canadians for international development cooperation, Canadians know little about it. For example, 59% of Canadians overestimate Canadian aid spending, and they don’t know what proportion of Canada’s aid actually reaches poor people. This lack of knowledge means support is soft and potentially fickle.
This gap in Canadian awareness requires government action. A more complete understanding of the value of development cooperation would lead Canadians to a firm belief that global peace, security and prosperity are as beneficial to us as they are to aid recipients. For example, good health care and early warning systems can respond quickly to prevent the spread of infectious diseases of people, plants, or animals. Fair and transparent rules for international trade and tax payments discourage corruption. Governments that are responsive to their people’s needs are less likely to generate mass displacements.
CSOs also have a role to play. They need to devote more energy to public engagement programs. They also need to find new ways to communicate messages that engage people, while helping them understand the complexity of the issues. Messages need to avoid self-serving ‘show and tell’ stories about how ‘we’ help ‘them’, reinforcing an inaccurate and harmful saviour/victim perception.
While it may be difficult to raise funds for public education and global citizenship programs, there is a critical step that CSOs can take immediately: They can undertake some serious self-analysis to ensure that the hundreds of millions of dollars they spend on advertising, promotion, fundraising and branding for their organizations don’t continue to promote images of misery and helplessness.
The current review provides an opportunity for Global Affairs Canada to do better as well. Its report should articulate a public engagement framework that fosters messages representing the complexity and the urgency of acting to reduce poverty and inequality in our interconnected world.
A plan for increasing public awareness of, and support for, development cooperation should include three key elements.
- Crafting an overarching communications framework based on the SDGs, a concept of mutual interdependence and our own long-term self-interest in development cooperation. This framework should point out that Canada’s international development cooperation program goes beyond aid to include, for example, diplomacy that seeks solutions to conflict, and regulations to ensure fair and transparent business practices. Canadians need and deserve to understand that complexity.
- Sufficient funding for public engagement. In the past, about 1% of the aid budget was spent directly by government in telling its own story, and in supporting its Canadian and overseas partners—CSOs, universities, unions, churches—to talk about their work. Former spending levels should be reinstated, and communications should be guided by the principles that undergird the SDGs.
- Government support to CSOs for their work overseas should take into account the level and quality of their messaging in Canada, and the extent to which they take on board the need to end misery-based fundraising.
Thoughtful messages based on solidarity and collaboration could do more for improved public awareness in the short term than any other single action.