Is the public still in favor of aid? Yes and no

Across the world this year, development spending is being cut. But why have governments taken those decisions? Are those cuts based on a fall in public support? Patrick Flynn, a data journalist at U.K. research agency Focaldata, spoke to Devex Global Development Reporter Elissa Miolene to discuss his agency’s recent research which looked at exactly this question. The research found that while overall public support had not shifted significantly, it had become much more polarized, and this has created an environment where political will to support aid has been reduced. “The decisions that have been taken by governments follow a kind of direction of travel, which we think has been kind of clear for a long time for those of us that have been working in the public opinion sector,” Flynn said. “These aren't isolated shocks, but maybe part of a broader pattern of changing public opinion as well as ideological shifts.” A bedrock of goodwill He said that fundamentally, aid continues to have what he described as “a bedrock of goodwill” but that it had suffered from a change in the political environment. In particular, he said, the swing vote in many presidential and parliamentary elections, in both the United States and Europe, is now down to a group of lower education, lower-income voters, who tend to be distrustful of aid. That’s a shift from 15 years ago, when the most important swing voters tended to be more highly educated and more in favor of aid. Aid, he added, had become more entangled politically with increasingly divisive issues such as gender, race, and climate change, and that there was now a much wider gap between the viewpoints of different political groups compared to 15 years ago. Flynn identified other factors which make aid high risk: the public both overestimate the amount of money spent on aid, and place it lower down on a list of their political priorities compared to the past. Using the right words He said research found that the public responded very differently to aid when it was described differently. The public were far more supportive of terms such as “emergency humanitarian assistance” but disliked more academic, left-coded terms such as “decolonization of aid.” Terms seen as elitist or technocratic were viewed less favorably, while concepts which highlighted the benefit to the donor country were more effective. There was considerable research into the growth of a concept known as “zero-sum thinking” where people believe that if someone else is getting richer, it means they are getting poorer, he said. “And by extension, if I'm giving money to a different country, it means that my country is getting poorer and that country is doing better,” he said. “It's one of the key things to [President Donald] Trump's rhetoric, this idea of zero-sum, and we see that growing across the west.” Making the case Flynn also addressed how the sector might make its case more effectively. “One of the biggest recommendations we have is to go back to basics and look at the fundamentals of what aid is delivering and what is popular among the public,” he said, “especially in an era where support is basically at risk.” One member of the audience asked whether there was a moral risk to reframing aid to make it more palatable to the public, and Flynn said that while there should be concerns about this, he believed that aid could be framed differently to appeal to different audiences, without compromising the fundamental moral character.