Dan Brockington

There is no getting away from it. NGOs make the conservation world go round. They do a lot of the best science, have some of the best fundraising ideas, and inspire new cadres of conservationists to join up. They have also done a good job at keeping social scientists in gainful employment, either in academia writing critiques, or, more recently in the organisations themselves responding to their academic colleagues.

There are two problems with all this attention however. First of all, and this is an old bug bear of mine, the literature seems to separate conservation NGOs and ‘development’ NGOs even though there is no real difference between them – and even though analyses of them draw almost identical conclusions. The second is the crudity of the categories at work. We seem to have just space for ‘BINGOs’ (Big International Non-Governmental Organisations) and all the rest, when in fact the scene is much more complicated than that. So, in a bid to get the taxonomy going, here is a list of NGO species that Katherine Scholfield and I observed in a large-scale survey of conservation NGOs operating in Africa.

As you can see the important thing with these classifications is to get the acronym right. In fact we have also identified a number of suitable acronyms for other categories, but are hesitant to name the NGOs they describe, or have been unable to find any to fit them. These include OH NGO! (the set of particularly silly NGOs); BROWN NGOs (the NGOs who will say anything to get approval); sOGNNGOs (just because it’s an unpronounceable palindrome); PINGOs the cold hearted callous NGOs; LINGO (non-Anglophone NGOs); SORRY I DON’T SPEAK THE LINGO (Anglophone NGOs); SONGs (Francophone and musical); WRONGs (Francophone, but misguided); TANGOs (pairs of NGOs moving in harmony, very rare); NGORONGORO (multiple use NGOs in northern Tanzania), and their neighbours over the border: NGONGs (a collection of Anglophone and Francophone brass pecussion NGOs focussing on conservation south of Nairobi).

More suggestions welcome.

This blog first appeared in Current Conservation here.

I argued in the previous blog that new directions in development data and demand for those data are opening up new possibilities for empirical data collection, and for feeding it into policy. I argued too that these new developments will not make it necessarily any easier to produce data-informed policy. There are all sorts of obstacles at work.

But we must now consider a slightly different order of problem. These derive not from any failings of data per se – because the facts in this case are plainly known and indisputable. Rather they derive from thinking that monitored, incremental change will be sufficient to bring transformation. This can be a dangerous lie.

In some instances, instead of looking to data to provide evidence for policy we need to recognise that the most powerful elements of the worldviews we are dealing with can be the myths and narratives that underpin them. Part of the condition of evidence free policy is that it exists in a realm where data may not have any purchase. The empirics depend upon the myths and narratives that lie behind them. Or to put this differently, some development goals are simply fantasies that cannot be combatted in the realm of fact or data.

For example consider the goal achieving full and productive employment. The stated Millenium Development Target 1B was achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people. This was plainly and indisputably not achieved by 2015. And yet the very same target has been set for 2030. This again will not happen. Only very particular forms of capitalism have ever got close to full employment, and that entailed not counting women’s work well. Taken at face value this target suggests a radical re-ordering and restructuring of society and a transformation of our norms and values. It is not the sort of thing which can be done through better use of data or more fact.

This kind of transformation is not achieved by charting progress over time. Rather, as Thomas Pogge has argued, examining

‘[W]hether an institutional order is harming people . . .  depends . . . on a counterfactual comparison with its feasible institutional alternatives’ (page 25).

Pogge had in mind slavery – you don’t chart progress from slavery by showing how slaves homes or health are improving. Ultimately the ills of slavery can only be addressed through emancipation. You have to imagine the alternative – the counterfactual comparison, of a world with slavery compared to one without – and then realise it.

But he goes on to point out that counterfactual alternatives already exist for many development injustices, and that where they exist then we cannot feel content with limited progressive change. This is a significant challenge for anyone keen on monitoring progress towards the sustainable development goals. As Pogge says

‘Most citizens of the affluent countries take comfort in the asserted decline of global poverty . . . They should instead take intense discomfort in the fact that a feasible alternative global order could have avoided most life-threatening poverty and its associated evils.’ (ibid)

What then are the important myths and their counterfactuals that we might want to recognise and take on in international development affairs? There are many, but, let me just touch on a couple. Perhaps the most problematic is the enduring myths of the primacy of GDP and economic growth, the alternatives to which are oddly both radical and obvious.

GDP is widely recognised to be the wrong way of measuring progress. GDP measures production, whether that be in pursuit of good things, or cleaning up the problems. If you produce stuff without causing pollution or health problems your GDP will be so high, but if you pollute and you additionally then have to spend money cleaning up the river, or curing the diseases that that pollution causes, then your GDP will get higher still. A sick or violent society in which millions of people are prescribed expensive anti-depressants or which imprisons large proportions of its population in expensive jails, and spends a huge amount on security and policing will, despite all that misery, enjoy a higher GDP than societies who are not so productive. As Lorenzo Fioramonti has shown growing GDP does not progress other indicators of well-being. And yet GDP remains the main indicator of progress and prosperity.

Constructing counterfactual measures of well-being and using them as the key indicators by which we will guide our collective economic lives is proving difficult. Nevertheless there are ever increasingly auspicious authorities supporting this shift. It is found in the work of Nobel Prize Winners such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. Tim Jackson’s ESRC funded research centre is precisely based on a vision of prosperity which may be possible without economic growth. Geographers JK Gibson-Graham insist that so much of what we actually do with our time, creativity and resources is not captured by capitalist enterprise. More generally, the degrowth movement, which argues for reduced GDP, is gathering strength with a variety of models of what degrowth might constitute and how it might come into being.

So while we seek better development data, I am also looking for the counterfactuals, that will allow us to imagine different ways of doing things, and of ordering our lives, and that make us feel discomfort when they present valid alternatives to present misfortune. Only with such counterfactuals can we find the home, the nurturing environment, for the new development data that I look forward to contributing.

This blog first appeared on the SIID site here.

See the full lecture on which this blog is drawn here.

There is much excitement, for good reason, about development data. This comes from a combination of the imperatives for more and better data from the Sustainable Development Goals (the SDGs), from new conceptions of what should be counted, and from new ways and technologies for counting and measuring social life. In this blog, drawn from my inaugural lecture, I explain why each of these elements are indeed exciting. I then outline why we must be modest in our expectations of how those data might inform policy. There have simply been far too many cases where the data are irrelevant to policy. In the second blog I will take the argument a step further to consider the limits even of policies which are profoundly informed by data.

The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in September 2015. There are 17 goals, covering all the traditional interests (poverty, health, gender equality and education) as well as a whole new set including energy provision, infrastructure, inequality and many more. These 17 goals have, collectively, realized 169 targets that they aim to achieve by 2030, and these targets have produced 230 indicators which will be used to determine whether or not they have been successful.

The SDGs are auspicious for anyone interested in development data because they set up a highly specified vision of what a prosperous world should look like. If these goals are to be successful on their own terms then this will hinge upon using the right sort of data in the right way. This means that getting better data, and understanding the limitations facing these data, becomes all the more important.

It seems that we are now awash with new ways of collecting data that could be useful for the SDGs. Some of these derive from using remote sensing, new algorithms and digital data. The spatial precision of satellite data has improved, as has their temporal frequency, and machine-reading of these data can be used to understand changing land use and household investments. The spread of mobile phones, and the growth of social and economic activity on social media, provide new proxies of human development, and new arenas of eminently measurable activity.

But it is not just the means of measurement which is exciting here – it is what we chose to measure and why. The SDGs are more broad-minded than the MDGs they have superseded. The MDGs were concerned to reduce poverty, and used poverty lines to determine who was poor. The SDGs want to eradicate all forms of poverty, and will be using a broader set of measures of what constitutes wealth and poverty as criteria for success. I find this particularly exciting because if we take a broader notion of what wealth and poverty mean we can end up seeing societies in different parts of the world in new ways.

I can illustrate this with a research project that we are completing in Tanzania, on which I am working with Christine Noe and Moses Mnzava from the University of Dar es Salaam. The project examines rural livelihood change and prosperity in Tanzania, a country which has long been poor, but which has seen dramatic increases in economic growth in the last 30 years or so. The trouble is that there were numerous signs that, according to poverty line data, this wealth was not being shared, particularly in the rural areas where most poor people can be found. Using different measures of poverty, which hinge on controlling and using assets, we are finding families have become wealthier. They have been able to invest the returns from farming activity into better homes, agricultural equipment and education.

Assets matter partly because they feature most prominently in the local definitions of wealth. But they are also centrally important to examine in any study of long term poverty dynamics, because the rural poor invest in assets. Consider this statement from a participant in a focus group in south-east Tanzania which I heard earlier this year.

We get money seasonally. [We] have earned three millions shillings, or two million shillings. Some people when they get money after the harvest they buy a TV, or solar panels, or all manner of things but now if he’s struck by some problem and needs 50,000 shillings he’ll have to wait 5 months.  In July if you ask someone for 500,000 shillings they will give it to you, but go to them in November and ask to borrow 200,000 to deal with a problem and they will tell you I have nothing, I have bought a TV, I’ve bought a plot, I’ve bought bricks.’

Assets matter to poor rural families because they provide a focus of investment that is particularly valuable in the absence of good banking services, and without regular, frequent sources of income.

This graph shows the growth in assets in Mtowisa in south west Tanzania where I once lived for a year in 1999-2000. It shows investment in houses, metal roofing, oxen and so one.

You can see the phenomenal growth in housing in that village in just ten years in this google earth images. This shows the village in 2003.

And this in 2013, and with all the newly built houses with metal roofs in that 10 year period circled in black.

But, and here is the catch, in every single one of the 20 plus village where we have worked on the livelihood change and prosperity project, the precise nature of the change, its drivers, its timing, the gendered distribution of benefits within households, the role of elites, the role of emigration or immigration, the crops and agricultural innovation involved – in every single case there is something different going on. The story here is that there is no single story.

And this is part of the research agenda that new conceptions of poverty and prosperity can unleash.  We can challenge problems of inequality by examining the different understandings of what wealth is and how it is distributed and by understanding the diversity of stories that need to be told to combat central notions and of what constitutes wealth and progress.

A second reason to be excited about development data emerges from an increasing conglomeration of questions about the accuracy and basic validity of data used in development. The work of scholars like Morten Jerven who has combined a quantitative analysis of the flaws and inconsistencies of GDP data, with an ethnography of the construction of those data, to argue that basic notions such as GDP have been mismeasured for years. Governments have not been able to measure their economies, particularly where so much activity is informal and very difficult to observe and count. Famous examples of these failings include the massive increase in wealth in Ghana that occurred overnight when its GDP baseline was recalibrated.

I am particularly pleased to be taking part in projects which extend this sort of critique. We are doing so specifically with respect to agricultural data, which are notoriously inaccurate because so many small-holders conduct their affairs informally and are generally rather suspicious and not necessarily truthful when answering surveys.

In the SAFI project lead by Phil Woodhouse and diverse partners internationally we have been able to show that, conceptually, ideas of what irrigation is are too narrow in these countries. Irrigation appears to be thought of as something requiring large concrete intakes, engineered channels and carefully planned division points. It is not deemed to refer to local practices of rice cultivation which involve small temporary dams in low lying areas, and water harvesting on raised ground. That, as Phil puts it, is just moving water around fields. It is not real irrigation.

But these official definitions are unsatisfactory, they do not seem to explain or describe farmer behaviour. Surveys of farmers in Tanzania suggest that many are growing rice, but that only 5% of them are irrigating it. This is unlikely. We predict that irrigation activity, defined as farmers’ deliberate management of temporary flooding in their fields is much more extensive. Preliminary results from analysis of Sentinel II radar data suggest that this is precisely the case – we can find evidence of irrigation that is one order of magnitude higher than agricultural census data predicts.

This work excites me because it combines all that is new in development data, for it re-conceptualises what we need to examine, challenges existing data, and proposes different data sources. With fresh thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and fancy kit like radar and good algorithms, we can shed new light on old problems.

But before we get too entranced by this brave new world of more relevant, accurate and believable facts we must remind ourselves of the limited role that data can play in tackling development problems. I have found repeatedly in my research that facts about things as diverse as basic aspects of environmental change in East Africa, to the role and influence of celebrity advocacy in the UK, seem largely irrelevant to the public debate, and policy discourse, about those topics. Data-informed policy is rare; often policy can be remarkably data free.

As we learn in any basic research methods class, new data and methods present us with a set of insights and then another range of problems that come with them. So, for example, there is a great deal of excitement and interest in the potential of new digital data derived from mobile phone use, and its ability to reveal new facts about social change. But there should be a deep concern for the inequalities and blind spots of these new data, that derive, for example from the unequal gendered access to and use of mobile phones. Fighting inequality requires continual vigilance lest new data renew marginalisation.

And, if we ever get good data, then a different set of problems emerges. Consider, for example, what happens when the data clearly demonstrate that international development goals are not achieved. For example, several of the millennium development goals failed to reach their targets. Reductions in infant mortality of 67% was demanded by 2015; but reductions of only 53% achieved. Reductions in maternal mortality of 75% were demanded by 2015 and only 45% achieved.

We must place these failures in context. David Hulme and Armando Barrientos have argued these standards have made a difference, they have raised interest in poverty alleviation strategies by national governments. In the absence of these goals achievements could have been even lower. But these are not, as one commentator claims, a set of promises that the world makes to itself. For these are promises which can be broken, they are disengaged from political processes. There is no mechanism for holding to account leaders who do not stick to these grand plans. Failure in these contexts is not costly, failure is free.

So, revolutions in development data are absorbing, exciting and reveal all sorts of new aspects about social life and the environment. We need to embrace them as much as possible. But we cannot expect that these new data will lead somehow, to evidence-informed policy. The barriers to that are multiple and enduring. They will be as impervious to new development data as they have been to old.

There is, however, a more profound objection that we have always to remember surrounding development data, and this is best visible not in the weaknesses of development data, but when they are strong – and that is the subject of the next blog.

This blog first appeared on the SIID site here.

When you are trying to change the world for the better it can help to distinguish between the more immediate causes of the problem you are tackling and the larger structural ones. More immediate causes of poverty, ill health and deprivation might include things like land loss, redundancy, unsafe sex or food price increases. The longer term structural causes of these problems include things like inequality, labour relations, trade relations, debt and the values and attitudes that sustain racism, sexism and diverse hatreds. So damaging are these structural forces to people that we can call them forms of structural violence.

Tackling global problems has to deal with both the symptoms and causes. But dealing with symptoms only, without planning when and how to tackle the drivers of the problem is not adequate. One of the distinguishing features of the work of celebrity in development is the tremendous creative energy which is devoted to coming up with innovative ways to tackle global problems. They can, potentially, be powerful, game changing initiatives. The crucial question to ask is what are they changing – the rules of the game, the more structural causes of problems, or merely some of their consequences? If the latter, when and how will they take in the bigger issues.

Product (RED) is an initiative Bono launched to support the work of the Global Fund. It works by getting leading Brands (Nike, Apple, Gap) to launch specific products and lines, a proportion of the profits of which go to the Global Fund. Its raised $160 million as of December 2010, which is a lot of money, although less than 1% of the $18.2 billion given to the Global Fund over the years. The Global Fund provides support for the work of fighting HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. Product (RED)’s funds go directly to high performing HIV/AIDS programmes in Africa such that people buying RED products can calculate exactly how many anti-retroviral (ARVs) pills their purchases are providing.

Lisa Richey and Stefano Ponte have just published Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World with the University of Minnesota Press. This book is an immensely readable, lively and edgy examination of the work of Product (RED), and its consequences for HIV/AIDS sufferers and the some high profile brands. I write this blog having just returned from the 2011 meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) where we discussed the book at an authors-meets-critics session.

Lisa and Stefano explore every aspect of Product (RED) – indeed it is perfectly suited for them as Lisa studies celebrity and health care delivery (esp HIV/AIDS) while Stefano works on certification, commodity chains and corporate social responsibility. They bring a good deal of prior learning and expertise to the book. They note that Product (RED) certainly delivers valuable ARVs to people who need them, that it does not peddle negative imagery of Africa and Africans, and it also neatly sidesteps the debates raging about the efficacy of aid.

They also have some rather telling criticisms. First, the Global Fund does not get involved with broader health care delivery systems; yet the success or otherwise of ARV treatment hinges on the broader social and institutional contexts in which people are taking the pills. Certainly there can be Lazarus effects but what sustains these effects, or makes them possible in the first place? Another way of putting this is that getting ARVs to people is a really good thing to do, but we cannot believe that it is sufficient in and of itself. The Product (RED) marketing encourages that belief.

Furthermore they argue that the forms of corporate social responsibility that are being practiced by the brands involved in Product (RED) are of the distant and disengaged variety. There is not much transparency, for example, with respect to which companies have donated how much to Product (RED). They also trace a shift from conscious consumption to ‘Causumer culture’. The former, promoted by certified and fair trade products, tries to ‘make visible the ecological and social relations embedded within a commodity’ (Raynolds, 2007: 50). The latter does not make these relations visible but relies on celebrity endorsement and corporate marketing to convince consumers they are doing a good thing. (The ‘Making Luxury Count’ site provides many other examples of this sort of practice.)

Initiatives like Product (RED) are hard to dissect and this book does a pretty comprehensive job in a way which is accessible to all sorts of readers. I felt there were three voices which were not so much missing from this book (it can only be so big) but which now need to be heard in debates about Product (RED). They are:

1. People taking ARVs in Africa. What do they make of this initiative, the drugs and the health systems of which they are part?
2. Public Figures. The authority of Product (RED) derives from the standing of Bono, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Farmer, what do they make of these criticisms of schemes which they have supported so strongly?
3. Consumers buying RED products. It may be hard to work out the social and ecological relations bound up in RED products, but what does this sort of purchasing do for consumers’ own personal journeys of awareness, consciousness and, potentially, activism?

But I think that the most telling points were raised by Dan Klooster in his commentary on the book at the AAG. What, he asked, are the opportunity costs of the sorts of problems that Lisa and Stefano raised? If money is being raised from the purchases of a group of consumers who are not anyway thinking particularly reflectively about their purchasing power then what does it matter that these particular forms of CSR are relatively weak? And, he noted, Bono does say that death is more important than labour issues, but hasn’t he got a point? Given that Darnton’s work shows that there are groups of people who care very little about aid or poverty might not initiatives like Product (RED) be a good way of taking from the (uncaring) rich and giving to the poor.

Brand Aid then creates the space for three important questions:

1. How do initiatives like Product (RED) effect consumer journeys into awareness and activism?
2. How do these initiatives affect corporate journeys into awareness, activism and engaged CSR?
3. Depending on the nature of these personal and corporate journeys, in what circumstances do any deficiencies in the scheme matter?

Why are these questions important? Because of the importance of tackling structural violence and not merely its consequences. Any solution to major problems which fails to challenge, or plan to challenge in the future, the structural violence underlying them can only be a temporary sticking plaster. Anything which claims to solve the problem while actually reinforcing its root causes is obscene – it makes us feel good about doing bad.

It has to be clear, therefore, that Product (RED), which encourages people to carry on as they were, just shop more, is in the process also challenging, or planning to challenge, the forms of structural violence that lie at the root of the problems it is trying to address. Lisa and Stefano argue that there are issues to address with Product (RED) but we need to see how these problems play out in diverse journeys to (and from) activism, and what, if any, harm is done by any deficiencies.

References:

Laura Raynolds. 2007. ‘Organic and Fair Trade Movements in Global Food Networks.’ In S. Barrientos and C.Dolan (eds) Ethical Sourcing in the Global Food System. Earthscan London.

We have seen, in the second and third parts to this series, that development NGOs have systematically organised and professionalised their work with celebrity advocates, and that this does not necessarily resonate well with British publics. What we have yet to see is how well, and how effectively celebrity can work with political and corporate elites. To understand it properly however, we have to see how well this form of advocacy fits with current democratic trends. Specifically, celebrity advocacy is tailor-made for post-democratic societies, which tend to favour inegalitarian elites, even as it lobbies against international inequality.

Elite enthusiasm for celebrity advocacy is unmistakable. For corporate leaders there is a strong commercial logic here: celebrity endorsement is expensive, but companies can get free association (if not, strictly speaking, endorsement) between their products and celebrities, and promote their CSR, if they support charities with good celebrity advocates. Just take a look at large charities’ corporate sponsorship pages and see how often they offer association with famous supporters as a carrot to possible corporate supporters. There is also a personal pleasure, for corporate leaders will get to meet the celebrity supporters themselves – a perk of the job, a reward for their success.

A similar logic works with politicians – it’s both a personal reward, and has all sorts of valuable, positive publicity opportunities. As one experienced campaigner put it:

‘Suddenly you are meeting with the chief of staff or with the principal instead of a staff member two or three levels below, because you are accompanied by a celebrity. You also might be able to get a hearing on Capitol Hill because one of those testifying would be a celebrity… That happens all the time.’

Or as another put it:

‘If you find a Bono politicians will meet them… at the end of the day they all love to meet celebrities, they really do, it’s incredible.’

Knowing how political elites think is rather hard. By definition they are somewhat inaccessible. But two reports gathered, rather effectively, elite views about celebrity advocacy for development. One of them summarises discussions of a 3-day ‘Brookings Roundtable’ which brought together 50 very high-level advocates and policymakers in 2007. The other is an investigation by Brendan Cox into development campaigning based on over 300 interviews – again with good access to elite workers.

Both reports are clear that celebrity advocacy is useful for development causes, but they are interesting for the different reasons they give for this view. The Brookings Roundtable welcomed the public response to celebrity advocacy. Specifically this meant:

‘The hundreds of thousands who attended the 10 “Live8” concerts in the run-up to the Gleneagles [G8] summit, the more than 2.4 million signatures for the ONE Campaign, and the 63.5 million-strong audience for the 2007 U.S. television special American Idol: Idol Gives Back.’

Note that these are rather passive forms of participation, a commitment-lite (or even commitment-less) support that worries some commentators because it works by providing the appearance of popular support – offering a mandate for higher-level lobbyists.

Brendan Cox reports a similar finding, observing:

‘Engaging celebrities is particularly valuable in short-term campaigns that want to simulate mass public support but do not have the time to build it in key countries’ (p. 55).

Celebrity serves as a proxy for public engagement. It signifies the public, without necessarily enrolling them more actively.

Celebrity advocacy works because many Western democracies are in fact ‘post-democratic’. Post-democracy, as explored most lucidly by Colin Crouch, is characterised by a particular set of behaviours in the public and policymaking sphere, in which electorates are not particularly active or enthusiastic in their task of choosing representatives and holding them to account. Rather, ‘political elites have learned to manage and manipulate popular demands’, and ‘powerful minority interests’ are making the political system work for them’. Celebrity advocacy will clearly thrive in post-democratic societies because of the way it panders to elite desires, and because of the way it invokes public support, without necessarily requiring strong public participation.

Why does this matter? Post-democracy matters because post-democratic societies further the interests of powerful minorities such as corporate leaders and their lobby groups, whose prime interest is to make economies and societies more profitable, and not more egalitarian. As Thomas Pikkety has pointed out so powerfully, inequality matters because it is self-sustaining, and intensifying.

Celebrity advocacy may be Janus-faced. It offers the appearance of participation, of richer democratic involvement and engagement, and it can be enrolled in support of the fight against inequality. Yet at the same time these richer democratic processes can proceed quite compatibly with increasing inequality and fewer egalitarian policies. Celebrity advocacy is part of that procession.

Theorists of media and politics welcome the processes of engagement and involvement of celebrity, social media and other new forms of engaging politicians. But we must also consider the outcomes of that engagement. If celebrity advocacy does allow for greater public participation then it also means that we participate now more thoroughly in our own marginalisation. That is purely logical. For if, generally speaking, economic and social inequality has been increasing nationally and internationally, and if forms of media promote a more inclusive politics, so therefore we must have been participating more in that greater exclusion.

So, celebrity advocacy for international development is a strange beast. As we have seen from the first blog on this topic, this is now an organised and professional sphere of development activity. There is a great deal of celebrity advocacy in the public domain but it does not necessarily engage the public effectively. As the second blog showed, much of it seems to pass us by. But this absence of public appeal does not matter very much; the public believes that the public is engaged, and that gives all the legitimacy required. Moreover, as I have argued in this third blog, elites are thoroughly engaged by it. Celebrity advocacy appears tailor-made for post-democracies, for it has all the trappings of participation, but none of its fuss and time-consuming bother. It frees those who know most about the topic to get on with the real discussions. As another high-level campaigner put it to me:

‘The fewer [people involved] the better. If we could do all that without the bother of reaching out to millions of people we would do so. It’s cheaper and easier.’

And this may well work. It may well produce the sorts of policies which reduce poverty and inequality in particular instances. But will it do so more generally and in the long run? For it depends on elites being genial and selfless when the historical trend is that they do not behave that way. We can conclude, therefore, that a more agonistic politics is required than that which celebrity advocacy perpetrates.

Links and Further information
This blog summarises aspects of a newly published book that reports the findings of a research project into celebrity advocacy and international development. Others papers from this research are available on this page, and more about the research project behind it is available here.

This is the last in a series of four blogs which explores different aspects of celebrity advocacy. The work was funded by the ESRC (RES 070-27-0035). It first appeared on the GDI site on 23rd September 2014. Here are the first blog, second blog and third blog in the series.

One of the most intriguing facts about celebrity is how little we know about how the general public respond to it. And, when you do try and find out, then one of the most intriguing things is how little notice many people appear to take of it. Yes, there are studies of fans and fandom. But fans are not necessarily the best indicators of how broader publics respond to celebrities. Indeed, by definition (the word is short for ‘fanatic’) a fan is an unusually committed supporter.

Certainly there are lots of studies of celebrity in advertising. But most of these are based on US college students. In fact, they have only recently begun looking outside the US and in doing so have discovered that US subjects are more susceptible to celebrity advertisements than other groups. In short, we still do not know much about how different people in different countries respond to celebrity.

As part of my work on celebrity advocacy, I conducted two large-scale questionnaires, each of over 1000 people, and 9 focus groups. You have to be careful when using this sort of research in understanding media use. As Jo Littler put it to me, we cannot simply read ‘truth’ from these findings; after all we aren’t always fully conscious of exactly how we are being influenced. Different research techniques, involving more in-depth interviews, observation or diaries are also required. I have not undertaken these because I did not have the time to do so, so more research is required! But, to the extent that the sort of work that I undertook is useful, the findings are reasonably clear. They are simply that celebrity advocacy is not noticed very much by many of the general British public.

This is partly because we do not concern ourselves with celebrity affairs generally. We come across it incidentally when reading about other things. It is partly because we just do not seem to find it very interesting, or even very exciting. Only about 20% of people spend more than 5 minutes a week reading or talking about it. It is an oddly uninspiring thing. This is best expressed in the words of a television executive who worked a great deal with celebrity and was keen on introducing effective celebrity programming into her work, but who said that:

‘Mostly I’ve found that a lot of communities who really take their cause seriously don’t really care about the celebrity angle… and you think, wow we might all be kissing the ground that these people walk on day and night because that’s what the industry is used to but when it actually comes to real people’s lives and their experiences it makes no difference.’

It’s partly because celebrity advocacy works in counterintuitive ways. People who are most interested in celebrity (generally young women) are least interested in their celebrities’ advocacy of good causes; they like celebrity in part because it is precisely not dull, worthy and political. As Rachel put it during a focus group discussion about Bono:

‘To be honest I’m quite lost in all of this… I don’t even know who Bono is. I felt kind of stupid not knowing who that is, but to be honest I’m living a life where I don’t care. Most of my friends are ooh yeah Peter Andre, that’s nice, he looks quite fit. I know it’s quite shallow… but… For me celebrities and charities don’t mix very well.’

Conversely, those who are most sympathetic to celebrity advocacy are generally least amenable to celebrity itself. They are sympathetic because they already like those causes. For the purposes of international development this means that they are rather few, for the needs of international development excite only a small proportion of the population.

If all this is true, how can celebrity advocacy possibly ‘work’? The key is that much of celebrity is mediated; it is experienced more or less remotely via screens, print or radio waves. But personal encounters matter more. They mean our lives are touched by the glamour of the media world. Most especially, they work for the political and corporate elites who matter so much for fundraising and lobbying.

It works also because the British public, when they do come across celebrity advocacy, are remarkably sympathetic towards it. While a great deal of celebrity advocacy passes by rather unnoticed, we cannot escape it during the great telethons that periodically appear on our television screens. We tend to applaud because it raises money, and because we think that development problems can be solved with such charity. Curiously however, we are often better at remembering who undertook these tasks, particularly if they suffered for it, than what precisely they were suffering for.

The final, and rather ironic, reason why it works is simply because of the belief in celebrity power. The British public think that celebrity will get media attention, and that the media attention will bring public attention. As one of the focus group members commented, ‘the bottom line is that any celebrity will get a charity media coverage and that has to be good’. However, on inspection, few of the British public pay much attention to celebrity, but the vast majority of us think, falsely, that everyone else is looking. In our surveys, 74% of respondents thought that other people pay more attention to celebrity than them. That is impossible. Yet so many were keen to emphasise how little they themselves were swayed by it. In the same surveys, only 3% of respondents were prepared to consider that other people could think less of celebrity than they did.

The power of celebrity then, is not that people are looking and listening, but that we all think that they are. Indeed, this also explains the frustrations that celebrity liaison officers experienced in working with celebrity in their organisations that I mentioned in the previous blog. The belief in celebrity advocacy helps to explain its politics, and how even without much actual public interest it can still flourish in contemporary democracies. But to understand how it works, we need to better understand thinking on post-democracy, and to this we turn in the final installment.

Links and Further information
This blog summarises a newly published paper (scroll down to May 8^th on that page) which is available on an open access license from this site. That paper, and others from this research are available on this page, and more about the research project behind it is available here.

This is the third in a series of four blogs which explores different aspects of celebrity advocacy. The work was funded by the ESRC (RES 070-27-0035). It first appeared on the GDI site on 1st September 2014. Here are the first blog, second blog and fourth blog in the series.

Celebrity is a normal part of development business these days. While we can all point to famous development advocates, I suspect that most of us do not know the extent to which development NGOs in Britain, and indeed the whole NGO sector, has transformed itself as part of an effort to work more effectively, and successfully with celebrity advocates. This blog describes this transformation and some of the tensions it has produced.

Most major development NGOs now have full time celebrity liaison officers who meet regularly in London in monthly forums, and have space on their websites dedicated to celebrity ambassadors, and advice to other charities. There are dedicated websites, blogs, and sections in papers concentrating on celebrity advocacy. In Hollywood, major talent agencies have full time members of staff who manage the charitable interests of their clients. Celebrity advocacy, and celebrity charity more generally, is a niche element of the celebrity industries, building celebrity brand, and the brands of the causes and companies associated with them.

It is particularly surprising how quickly this systematic organisation of celebrity advocacy has happened. Celebrity advocacy for worthy causes overseas has its iconic moments (Band Aid in 1984, Live Aid in 1985, and Princess Diana walking through cleared minefields in 1997) but the professional organisation of celebrity-charity has emerged strongly since the millennium. In order to understand the celebrity advocacy phenomenon, I interviewed just over 120 people: celebrity liaison officers, journalists, media professionals, and agents and publicists in the celebrity industries.

It is clear from these interviews that the celebrity industries themselves are not as enthusiastic about these relationships as the NGO community would like them to be. Celebrity ambassadors are, almost always, not paid for their work for NGOs. And for that reason charities’ many requests are not always welcome. Many agents tell their clients to choose three charities, stick with them, and do three or four events a year. All the others – and there can be hundreds of requests a week for prominent clients – can simply be ignored. The better liaison officers, who have established good associations with celebrities, will also seek to establish enduring professional relationships with the agents, for the agents are likely to have a much longer professional life than any individual celebrity. Nonetheless, it is also plain that even celebrities most committed to their charities are subject to the whims of their trade. Lucrative commercial contracts may pop up at inconvenient moments that will make it impossible to honour other commitments. That is part of the territory.

It is against this background that celebrity liaison officers have to try to build enduring relationships with celebrity patrons – because enduring relationships will appear more authentic in the press, and are more likely to be fruitful for their organisation. For development organisations, the classic, and most rewarding, means of doing so was the field trip, which could be life-changing for the celebrities involved. But these are rare and expensive, and in their absence other means have to be found of deepening celebrity commitment and associations. Curiously, this can mean organising events for the celebrity to attend, but where the purpose of the event is to deepen the relationship with them. One of the officers spoke of ‘creat(ing) situations where talent can come learn about something’; another was ‘working to invent’ domestic events as a way of deepening relationships until the opportunity came along for a field trip.

In constructing these events liaison officers have to deal with a continual, annoying distraction: misconceptions on the part of their colleagues as to how celebrity can be used. These colleagues often have little understanding of the time constraints celebrities face, or their suitability or aptitude for particular tasks. Or the tasks are simply ill-thought through, with the celebrity element added in the mistaken belief that this will make a bad task ‘work’. Interviewees from the celebrity industries bemoaned the fact that many of the requests that charities proposed were simply rather boring. Ironically, a busy celebrity liaison officer will spend much time advising colleagues in the NGO not to work with celebrity. As one complained, it’s ‘maddening… half of my job, half of my week, is about managing the expectations of my colleagues’.

It quickly becomes apparent when talking to celebrity liaison officers that the rise of celebrity in the NGO movement is, at least in part, driven by corporate sponsors’ enthusiasm for celebrity ambassadors, and that this can produce particular tensions. Corporate sponsors like associations with celebrity because they offer (free) favourable publicity for their products, helping to boost their brand through links and associations with the charities’ ambassadors. Corporates can in fact make life hard for the liaison officers – for what they would like, ideally, is free celebrity endorsement of their products, which runs counter to the business model of celebrity and the goals of their agents.

All this matters because much hope is invested in the power of celebrity to raise awareness and support for development causes for particular development organisations. If celebrity advocacy is to realise these hopes, if it is to be used effectively, then we need to better understand the pressures under which it is produced. Part of the purpose of this series of blogs, and my wider research on the topic, is to facilitate that understanding. The full paper on which this installment is based provides much more detail and substance to the picture I have merely sketched here.

It matters too because one of the continual questions surrounding celebrity advocacy is whether particularly famous individuals ‘really’ care for the causes that they support or if they are just doing it for the publicity, or even payment. I find it an odd question even to ask. All of us have a mixture of motives in supporting good causes. Why should celebrities be any different? The very question elevates the celebrity to some sort of superior being who might be able to act out of pure altruism. Rather, it is by examining the structure and organisation of celebrity advocacy that we can better understand what ‘really’ causes celebrity advocacy to occur. Doing so, ironically, provides a much better setting in which to understand the role of individual motivation.

But the construction of celebrity advocacy is only part of the story. We also need to understand how it is consumed, and how that consumption varies in different audiences. We will begin that in the second blog which looks at responses to celebrity advocacy among the British public.

Links and further information
This blog summarises a newly published paper which is available on an open access license from this site. That paper, and others from this research are available on this page, and more about the research project behind it is available here.

This is the second in a series of four blogs which explores different aspects of celebrity advocacy. The work was funded by the ESRC (RES 070-27-0035). It first appeared on the GDI site on 8th August 2014. Here are the first blog, third blog and fourth blog in the series.

A recording of a lecture I gave on this topic is available at this site.

Let me congratulate you. If you are reading this blog then either you are one of the world’s great and famous people (well done!), or you are about to join their ranks (ditto!). This must be true because there is so much fame about these days that it is difficult to avoid. Pretty much the only people who are not famous or not yet famous are those who were famous and are now about to relaunch their careers.

In the off-chance that most readers are not yet A-listers, and still forging their public persona, then let me offer some advice on your charitable commitments. You will have noticed that almost all the greatest famous people try to save the world at least in some small way, a number of them have even become famous just for trying to do so. Doing something to improve humanity is a requirement of being famous. If you are new to the game then your agent will instruct you shortly to choose three good causes with which you have an authentic connection and lobby for them. If they have not done that yet then get a new agent.

There is, I admit, just a small chance that you are one of a radical vanguard which eschews fame and struggles to work out what all the fuss is about celebrities. Most of the time you will not be able to recognise who everyone else is apparently talking about. You may have read this post because you failed to notice the subtitle. Well do not give up just yet – its core argument may well fill you with joy. For I believe that you are not, in fact, part of any radical vanguard at all. The outrageous argument I want to put to you is that, in Britain, celebrity is a minority interest. It is not as popular as its populist appeal suggests.

However, if that amuses you, I’m afraid the happiness will be short-lived. For I will also argue that popular support is not necessary for celebrity advocacy to thrive. Celebrities will save the world, or at least shape it in powerful ways, even if we ignore them.

There has been a quiet revolution in the NGO movement in the last 15 years which has seen 75% of the largest set up professional bespoke celebrity liaison programmes dedicated to pursuing and deepening relationships with artists and talent. Managers and agents in turn have become adept at working with charities. So what does this this collective non-plussed reaction mean for this new organisation of relations?

It turns out that this is in fact surprisingly good news all round. In a new book out this month I have argued that celebrity advocacy is marked by four paradoxes of celebrity advocacy. The first is, as we have just seen, that celebrity advocacy occupies a significant proportion of the public domain, but does so without engaging particularly well with much of the public. But the second is that failure to engage does not really matter. Many people at the core of advocacy, and in the political and business elites whom the advocates are lobbying, simply do not notice any lack of engagement. In these circles celebrity advocacy can be remarkably effective. Celebrity works for them in ways which do not work for most of the public. Third, while celebrity advocacy exists to be seen and noticed by as many people as possible, the dazzle of flashbulbs and exposure provides an inscrutable veil over their real influence. The very act of appearing and being seen also conceals. In the glare of publicity it is we, the viewers and consumers of the spectacle, who are blinded.

And so what does all this mean for celebrity advocacy? Well, the fourth paradox is that celebrity advocacy works so well with elites that it might even be a progressive force. In the post-democratic societies dominated by exclusive power-brokers celebrity gets listened to, and if that could be wielded in the right hands it could lead to more progressive change. This is potentially good news for the development charities bent on improving the lot of the poorest and fighting injustice – and their celebrity supporters. The challenge is how to wield this strangely unearned power effectively.

This is the first in a series of four blogs which explores different aspects of celebrity advocacy. The work was funded by the ESRC (RES 070-27-0035). Here are second blog, third blog and fourth blog in the series.

Who is your favourite conservationist, or environmental activist? Do you have a hero who inspired you onto your current life path? If not, allow me to suggest a few. How about Arnold Shwarzenegger, the former governor of California, actor and Terminator? Arnie was named by the The Observer’s ‘Eco-Power’ list, as one of a number of ‘activists, film-makers, writers politicians and celebrities who will be setting the environmental agenda’ after he had, among other things ‘effectively outlawed his own hummer’ while in power. If you object that he flew to work in a private plane a bit too often to qualify then how about Brad Pitt, an actor, (for building green homes in New Orleans). Or how do you feel about Walmart, the US retailer, which was listed by The Observer because it has ‘promised to apply eco labels to thousands of product lines’.

There was a quick repost to the publication of the ‘eco-power’ list from the UK environmentalist activist and writer George Monbiot. George, responding in The Guardian, was not amused. In part he objected to the lifestyles and roles of some of the people listed. Some of the people on that list (Jay Leno, a chat show host) owned a few too many cars; one, Alan Mulally, who is the CEO of Ford, is responsible for making quite a few of them. ‘Much of the list’ Monbiot complained ‘was a catalogue of rich and powerful people who have now added green – or some nebulous semblance of green – to their portfolios.’

But Monbiot had some more fundamental objections. First, ‘eco and power occupy different spheres’. His environmentalism is about challenging systems which concentrate resources onto a few. It cannot celebrate the lives and achievements of people who have done so well out of those systems. Second, the environmental movement is about collective effort and solidarity. The media may like to promote the work of a few individuals which it thinks is rich and special. But we must reject, Monbiot argues, the superman myth that individuals can save the world. ‘In reality, only big social movements, emphasizing solidarity and collective effort are likely to be effective.’ Furthermore, he insisted, ‘Environmentalism is one of the last hold-outs against celebrity culture’ and this ‘eco-power’ list portends an invasion of celebrity interest which had to be resisted.

Monbiot’s argument has much to commend it. For a start if people who are not particularly beautiful, rich, articulate or charismatic began to get more attention then I would be bound to benefit. Lets face it, most of us would. But, more seriously, there are difficulties in moving from the idealism of this call into real life environmental and conservation movements. Examine almost any environmental movement and you will find some dominate figures, sometimes towering personalities, at work.

Can you imagine, for example, accounts and histories of conservation and environmentalism in the US which did not mention John Muir, Rachel Carson or David Brower? In Australia without David Flannery or Penelope Figgis? In India without Valmik Thapar, Billy Arjan Singh or Vandana Shiva? In the UK without mention of Tony Juniper or David Bellamy? I am not arguing that these people are celebrities, many may well eschew, or have eschewed, fame. The point is simply that environmental movements, like any other social movement, cannot evade the power of personal charisma. Solidarity and collective effort are essential to environmentalism but it is difficult to imagine their being mobilized without charismatic power. Monbiot’s complaint gave no space for the workings of charismatic power or the demands of audiences and participants for it.

The prominent individuals in environmental and conservationists movements are not just media darlings, they are produced by forces within the social movements themselves. Often these people are good communicators, they make good speakers and are powerful motivating forces. Indeed there is a distinct tendency among left wing activist and environmental movements in the UK to demand the same people address their conferences. Naomi Klein is a favourite, and another is George Monbiot.

Coping with the tendency to throw up leaders and follow them is challenging and requires considerable effort from both leaders and listeners alike. When I heard Naomi Klein speak at a book launch (and I listened as irreverently as I could) I was impressed by the way she directed her audience to local activist groups so that they could get involved and not just listen. Monbiot has done the same (at least I think he did, I was virtually ignoring him at the time). Flat social movements have to be fought for.

So given that this is a fight, and I’m rather scared of fights, I think we actually do really need Arnie. Who better to take on an entire social movement and squash it flat whether it wants to be or not? Please come back Arnie; you did promise you would.

This post first appeared in Current Conservation here