Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT - Part 1

COMMUNICATING DEVELOPMENT...

At the time, the author was Projects and Development Education Officer for APACE (Appropriate Technology and Community and Environment), a Sydney-based NGO operating in the fields of food security (sustainable village agriculture) and village energy (micro-hydroelectric systems) in the South Pacific.

The need for effective communication

Development aid NGOs rely on effective communication to get their messages to the public and, in some cases, to encourage the public to donate money to their programmes.

The seminar reported in these pages was organised to discuss NGO communication so it could be improved.

Opening

Deborah Stokes, Deputy Director General, AusAID...

NGOs are far more successful than government at community awareness.

Although government and NGOs are not always mutually supporting they have common interests.

Bill Armstrong, President, ACFOA...

The government, private and community sectors should work on aid together. ACFOA supports communication with AusAID.

Community support for the aid programme of between 65 per cent and 70 per cent provides a good start to developing an understanding of the causes of underdevelopment among the community and how it can be tackled through aid.

Shaping Community Attitudes

Hugh Mackay, Mackay research...

Hugh started with an assertion based on his social analysis research: "Something has changed in Australian society during the 1990s".

He identified these changes as:

• Australia has become a tougher, rougher place to live
• society is increasingly tightly regulated
• there is less volunteering in the community
• there is less compassion
• people are less giving.

These changes are due to:

• the rise of the 'baby boomer' generation
• the user-pays factor
• the cost cutting mentality.

Mackay went on to analyse these factors.

Rise of the baby boomers

Mackay described them as a "peculiar generation" born into the paradoxical influences of the late-1940s and early 1950s. The baby boomer generation has been shaped by:

• the post-World War Two economic boom which brought economic growth, near-full employment and the sense that a positive economic outcome was the generation's birthright
• the notion that life was destined to be prosperous and "materially rich"
• the insecurity brought by the Cold War.

These paradoxical influences produced a generation which wanted to claim its perceived dues of comfort and economic birthright quickly because of the insecurity induced by the Cold War. This produced an ethos of instant gratification, materialism and the entitlement to comfort.

• debt was seen as the means to instant gratification and the generation subsequently developed the worst record for savings
• the 1960s and 1970s were decades of overexpectation.

Mackay asserted that the baby boomer generation was ill-prepared for their middle years because the Cold War did not become hot and the prosperity foreseen was "a promise that could not be delivered".

No moral framework has come into existence to deal with the economic, technological and social turbulence of the current period - a period unprecedented in Australian history.

Mackay said:

• the baby boom generation is seeking the happiness promised during its early years but this remains undelivered
• although the generation pioneered changes in the workplace, the family and in gender relations, these is now the perception that something is wrong
• this has generated talk of traditional values but has not produced any large scale return to past standards; answers have been sought in an inward direction, in personal growth and development and the New Age movement.

There is now a sense of moral discontent and a state of uncertainty.

The user pays mindset

The growing practice of charging for what were once free services had brought emotional and cultural effects.

These include:

• a move away from notions of the 'common good'
• a move away from community
• a declining expectation to receive of give freely
• increasing emphasis on personal rights rather than citizen responsibility
• notions of value for money including value for the tax dollar.

The emerging user pays mindset that permeates the community leads to the attitude of not paying for what is not used. This, Mackay, asserts, is anti-communitarian and has implications for the social spending programmes of government.

The cost cutting mentality

The cost cutting mentality "is an economic dogma with social consequences that will produce discomfort", says Mackay.

The mentality is prevalent in business and government, both of which currently display an obsession with balanced or surplus budgets. This is why there has been no outcry over the reduction to the overseas aid budget to 0.29 per cent of GDP rather than 0.7 per cent of GDP recommended by the UN.

Reducing the budget is now seen as preferable to increasing it, according to research.

Australians socially insecure

Mackay cites recent research which discloses that around 32 per cent of Australian adults and 41 per cent of children are reliant on some kind of government welfare as indicators of the present sense of insecurity.

The social climate feeds attitudes of anti-immigration and domestic security.

"Wealthy Australians are becoming more neurotic about their security", Mackay said. "People feel self-protective... people feel unsure, edgy. They are not quite sure what's happening to their society".

Attitudes can be changed

Mackay proposes that community attitudes be changed though getting people to think and act differently is an enormous job.

"People hold their attitudes because of the way they behave", said Mackay, adding that:

• attitudes are the outcome of personal experience
• argument simply reinforces existing attitudes and is counter-productive.

Community change, Mackay says, is never due to attitudinal change. It is behavioural change that leads to attitudinal change.

Evidence supporting this proposition, Mackay says, comes from the fight against drink driving. It was intervention in the driving environment through the introduction of random breath testing which created the pressure for new driving behaviour and to an eventual attitude change to drink driving.

In a similar way, the flooding of the market with Bankcard when the credit card system was introduced encouraged its use and attitudinal change by skeptics after they had used the cards.

Attitudinal change and aid

The exposure necessary to changing attitudes to aid through having Australians experience global problems is not really available. This, says Mackay, makes necessary the utilisation of the reinforcement effect.

The reinforcement effect implies finding existing, positive community attitudes and reinforcing them.

Mackay identified two possibilities for positive reinforcement:

1. the fragile planet attitude
2. the perception of falling short of out own ideals.

The fragile planet attitude

The notion of a fragile Earth implies the need for greater responsibility beyond our own economic development and comfort and of sharing the Earth.

Already exploited by the environment lobby, the attitude takes the long road and starts with children, who are already familiar with the attitude.

It is necessary to draw the link with the survival of people as well as the environment.

Falling short of our own ideals

This is a strong feeling among the baby boomer generation that they are:

• not living up to their values
• disillusioned about intractable unemployment, welfare dependency, self-centredness and lack of compassion.

The sense that people are not living according to their preferred values could be exploited in the interests of overseas aid. Aid could become to be seen as a means to enact the convictions they are unable to enact locally.

Mackay's tips to achieve this include:

• supply people with a sense of purpose
• focus on behaviour
• do not focus on attitudes or make it explicit, although attitudes should be tapped into
• provide people with something tangible which would be seen as a good thing to do for a person or community - this could be the focus of a project
• be specific; the more material and tangible, the more the need is seen and the more appropriate the response; this will lead to attitudinal change and greater future generosity.

Community and philanthropy

Comments made by Mackay in response to questions:

• philanthropy is an outcome of becoming a community
• Australia may still be too immature to be a community
• we need to " ...create spaces where people feel part of community" and to connect with people to develop a sense of community.

Turbulence is all they know

Young people today:

• know only a turbulent society
• consequently, recognise change as normal
• have more flexible attitudes than their parents and, especially, than their grandparents.
• want to keep their options open and avoid too much commitment
• have shortlived loyalty.

Tips for development educators

• the fact that people focus on success stories provides opportunities to educate the public
• reinforce attitudes that go with positive behaviour to increase the probability that they will be repeated
• engage in public advocacy to explain what people get for their aid dollar.