Development Centre Studies Public Opinion And The Fight Against Poverty

Sustaining the fight against global poverty will be possible only if the "wider civil society", i.e. citizens in richer countries, actively and critically support international development co-operation efforts. The willingness undoubtedly exists ...

This report considers recent trends in public attitudes to development aid and the policy implications. It also looks at education initiatives to promote greater public awareness of efforts to tackle global poverty and contains a series of individual OECD country reports. Key findings include that public support in OECD member countries for helping in international development co-operation efforts to aid poorer countries has remained consistently high for two decades, with no sign of aid fatigue. Public donations to NGOs have been steadily increasing, mostly in reaction to emergency and natural disasters in developing countries. However, there are public concerns about aid effectiveness. Public awareness and understanding of poverty and development issues and official development assistance (ODA) remains limited, with the media identified as a primary source of information. Policy conclusions drawn include the need for better data monitoring of public opinion regarding international development co-operation, greater investment in global education and improved information on aid policies and programmes.

This collection of studies of public attitudes to development co-operation in OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Member countries demonstrates that the concept of "aid fatigue" is misplaced. A serious lack of adequate knowledge about ...

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

This book provides a comprehensive search for the basic political drivers of international development cooperation, based on the policy and performance of the OECD countries from the early 1960s to the present. The author focuses on the stated and implemented policies of the four so-called frontrunners and the Western hegemon, scrutinizing the changing trends in the justifications, objectives and guidelines set for the policy and their evolving performance vis-à-vis the international ODA target. Through extensive research, the work examines predominant world-views, societal value systems and foreign policy traditions, in order to find the policy drivers that vary nation to nation and how development assistance has evolved globally.

This booklet highlights key lessons learned on engaging with the public based on DAC members’ practices as documented in peer reviews, DevCom’s reports and publications and wider work from across the OECD.

The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

This book focuses on the ethical demands of extreme poverty and develops a political theory of practical change. Welding together political realism and moral aspirations, it argues that a re-imagined form of development NGO can help the global North break free from the dominant and persistent charity paradigm and drift towards a justice-based understanding of extreme poverty. It offers an original explanation of why the charity paradigm persists and why the “justice not charity” messages from development NGOs have changed few minds. The author argues that anyone concerned with a paradigm shift from charity to justice need to radically rethink the problem of political communication: who should communicate what messages about extreme poverty in what ways? Based on a rational choice critique of the competitive development NGO sector, the author calls for sector-wide reform and the emergence of a new political agent – the Avant-garde NGO - which transcends the charity frame that NGOs currently find themselves locked in. Further, inspired by literary theory and social psychology, he offers a fresh account of how the Avant-garde NGO could, through reflective public engagement, induce attitude change and lead genuine social and political reform.