Prepare for some downbeat news:
People in the UK understand and relate to global poverty no differently now than they did in the 1980s. This is the case despite massive campaigns such as the Jubilee 2000 debt initiative and Make Poverty History; the widespread adoption and mainstreaming of digital communication techniques and social networks; steady growth in NGO fundraising revenues; the entire Millennium Development Goal story; and the establishment of a Westminster consensus on core elements of development policy.
By many measures we have made amazing strides forward in recent years, but the public have largely been left behind. The result is that we operate within social and, by extension, political conditions that are precarious in the immediate term and incommensurate to the challenges of poverty and climate change in the medium and long term.
This is the blunt intro to Finding Frames (pdf, 120 pages; see also this Guardian post), a new report by Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk, on ways to renew the international development narrative in the UK. They have some blunt advice for NGOs, too, notably that they need to
“shift the balance of NGO public engagement activities away from ‘transactions’ and towards ‘transformations’, [which means] placing less emphasis on ‘£5 buys…’ appeals and simple campaigning actions, and more emphasis on providing supporters with opportunities to engage increasingly deeply over time through a ‘supporter journey’”.
I think this is a really important point. I suspect that a lot of people are currently stuck in a situation in which they
a) mind deeply about global issues like development and climate;
b) are rightly sceptical about what they can achieve through party politics and elections;
c) are equally sceptical about how much difference it will make if they engage with NGOs on the terms that NGOs offer (sign this petition, give us a tenner a month), again with good reason; but
d) don’t want to become Climate Camp style activists either.
My hunch is that the key to engaging these kinds of potential activist is to recognise that they actually want to go a lot further than they’re being asked to by NGOs or by governments. Three memes that I think might catch:
1. Even as pressure on government aid budgets starts to increase, I think we might see big increases in giving from the most committed activists. Look at this year’s Comic Relief haul – a record £74 million. Look at this guy. These may be tastes of what’s to come.
2. A major upgrade in tools for calculating the impact of your lifestyle – think ecological footprint calculators on steroids, that can grab data direct from online shopping orders and electronic utility billing, and that link up with social networks, leading to much greater transparency and gradually increasing peer pressure on people to reduce the global impact of their consumption choices as the climate and development impacts of current energy use patterns, diets and so on start to become clearer.
3. A shift towards activists expecting to have a role in designing and running campaigns, not just being petition fodder (c.f. my ActionAid report, which argues that “civil society organisations should embrace a change that is coming anyway, and put their members in charge of their organisations – using technology platforms to ask them regularly what to campaign on, where, how to do it, and how they want to be involved”).
