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Beyond Charity: Helping NGOs Lead a Transformative New Public Discourse on Global Poverty and Social Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Abstract

Nongovernmental development organizations in the global North have a mission-critical blind spot: collectively, they are unequipped to intentionally bring about the kind of long-term change in social norms, attitudes, and beliefs in their home countries that their missions and their standard rhetoric demand. They long ago lost control of the media and public narratives around global development, if indeed they ever had it, and have instead been locked in a toxic and inaccurate paradigm, described through an increasingly outmoded core “charity” story that is unrepresentative of the reality of global development and that restricts their appeal to the public. Of the many reasons for this, one is examined in detail here: a disconnect with the latest learning from a range of academic disciplines, which leads to overreliance on consumer marketing approaches to communication and campaigning that are unsuited to the long-term and transformative tasks the NGOs set themselves. This paper looks to explore one diagnosis on public attitudes that such a connection would likely highlight; outline some of the key beliefs and assumptions that sustain the status quo; and suggest how academics, through a group such as Academics Stand Against Poverty, can help to start remedying the situation.

Type
Academics Stand Against Poverty
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Collier, Paul, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 184Google Scholar.

2 Throughout this article I will refer to NGOs as if they are a collective group with broadly similar characteristics. This is shorthand for sectoral norms, and reflects perceptions from the public more than it might individual departmental or even organizational practice. It is not meant to suggest a complete uniformity either within or between all NGOs.

3 See ActionAid, “Our Vision and Values”; www.actionaid.org.uk/100052/our_vision_and_values.html.

4 See Save the Children, “Achievements and Actions”; www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/2108.htm.

5 The British Overseas Aid Group is a small and largely informal peer group of five of the biggest agencies listed, established in the mid-1980s, in part to counter negative perceptions of aid. One of their first joint exercises was to set up New Internationalist magazine, which actually espoused system analysis, rather than a “charity” approach. It is not a publication designed for the mass market, however, so it does not reach a national mass audience.

6 This information is from 2009/10 Annual Reports and accounts, and includes all reported campaigning, trading, education, and fund-raising activity. It does not include governance costs.

7 It is impossible with publically available information to determine precisely how much of that was campaigning in the traditional sense and that therefore might have been trying to do something other than direct marketing, but from what is available it would seem to be about 10 percent.

8 Darnton, Andrew with Kirk, Martin, Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public in Global Poverty (London: BOND, 2011)Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 5.

11 Crompton, Tom, Common Cause: The Case for Working with Cultural Values (Surrey, UK: WWF, 2010)Google Scholar.

12 Richard H. Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan, “How Behavioral Economics Differs from Traditional Economics”; www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BehavioralEconomics.html.

14 Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644.

16 Jansson-Boyd, Cathrine V., Consumer Psychology (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2010), chap. 1, p. 2Google Scholar.

17 As of the day of writing, Apple is the largest music vendor, game company, tablet maker, smartphone provider, most valuable brand, and the most valuable technology company in the world; www.marketingapple.com/.

18 Taken from Thaler, Richard and Sunstein, Cass R., Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

19 Much has been written on this subject. See, e.g., Lakoff, George, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008)Google Scholar; and Westen, Drew, The Political Mind: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: PublicAffairs, 2007)Google Scholar.

20 “Dan Brown Tops Oxfam's ‘Least Wanted’ Chart,” Guardian, September 3, 2010; www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/03/dan-brown-oxfam-least-wanted.

21 npfSynergy, “Trust in Charities Bounces Back Whilst Faith in Banks Wilts”; www.nfpsynergy.net/mdia_coverage/our_press_releases/trust_in_charities_bounces_back_whilst_faith_in_banks_wilts.aspx.

22 The Make Poverty History campaign involved scores of NGOs in a range of countries focused initially on pressuring rich countries at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, to commit to principles of fair trade, debt relief, and effective aid for those in poor countries. Concerted efforts continue in several countries under the Make Poverty History banner. See www.makepovertyhistory.org/takeaction/.

23 Opinions differ as to who should claim what level of credit, or even blame, but it is undeniable that the campaign made the agreement considerably more likely, if not outright possible.

25 Andrew Darnton with Martin Kirk, Finding Frames, p. 13.

26 The growth of the consumer culture that led to a ubiquitous jeans market, though a fascinating topic that in many ways demonstrates the power of the application of wide and emergent knowledge, is not the topic for this paper. Readers interested in this could do worse than watching the BBC documentary series The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.

27 Crompton, Tom, Common Cause: The Case for Working with Cultural Values (Surrey: WWF, 2010)Google Scholar.

28 See, e.g., Global Cool; www.globalcool.org/.

30 See Charles Kenny, “Sharing the Burden,” Foreign Policy, April 2, 2012; www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/02/sharing_the_burden?page=0,1.

31 This question takes on a business model dimension when applied to complete fund-raising models like child sponsorship, upon which several large NGOs depend for large amounts of their income.

32 See Mission Imblogable, “Top 5 Corporate Viral Videos”; www.missionimblogable.co.uk/2011/04/top-5-corporate-viral-videos.html.

33 See Lakoff, The Political Mind; Darnton with Kirk, Finding Frames; and Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allen Lane, 2011)Google Scholar.

35 See hbr.org/authors/porter.