Introduction

Social change is the raison d’être of the development education (DE) sector. It aims to eradicate social and economic inequalities through a process of learning that supports action as summarised in the following definition from the European DEEEP project: ‘It enables people to move from basic awareness of international development priorities and sustainable human development, through understanding of the causes and effects of global issues to personal involvement and informed actions’ (DARE Forum, 2004).  This is a widely shared approach to development education which also extends to governments. For example, Irish Aid suggests that development education ‘seeks to engage people in analysis, reflection and action for local and global citizenship and participation’ (Irish Aid, 2006). This articles aims to discuss the role of development organisations in effecting social change primarily by reference to the sectors in Ireland and Britain. It argues that the sector has limited engagement with social movements which share many of the values and social vision of development education and could potentially widen its impact on society. A stronger and more radical social base could enable development education to initiate dialogical discussion on issues pivotal to our future like sustainability in the context of the prevailing model of growth.

            This article will argue the case for a more rounded and substantial engagement with development education within the development sector itself by examining the deficits of the Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign events in 2005 and missed opportunities arising from the recent financial crisis in Ireland. The article will begin by examining the outcomes of recent research on development education and overseas aid which suggests that cosmetic engagement with development issues, as appeared to be the case for example with Make Poverty History, results in short-term public mobilisation and disappointing outcomes. It is argued that a more radical approach to campaigning that embraces the reflective practice of development education could generate a more meaningful and fruitful engagement with the public. It goes on to suggest that the reluctance of many key constituents in the development sector to engage in the debate around Ireland’s recent financial collapse and loss of economic sovereignty represented a missed opportunity to educate the public about fundamental aspects of development. It arguably undermined the sector’s credibility as a critical voice in the non-governmental sector and represented a derogation of development education’s role as an agent of local as well as global development.  

The article concludes that more sustained public engagement with development issues could be generated through stronger links with social movements and a more radical agenda. The sector could become a more vital component of civil society by connecting the local to the global.

Shallow public engagement with development

In a recent briefing on engaging the public in tackling global poverty in Britain, Think Global (formerly Development Education Association) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) suggest ‘that public support for development, whilst still widespread, is shallow and that public opinion is increasingly polarised on this issue’ (October 2010). Hudson and van Heerde have questioned the assumption that there is an ‘overwhelming level of public support for the principle of aid to poor countries’. In fact, they argue that the causal link between public support and development aid ‘does not enjoy empirical support from available data’ (2010:20). Hudson and van Heerde have found that the level of engagement with development in Britain is ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ which supports the notion that public knowledge of development lacks the complexity and depth required to engage sustainably with the issues underpinning global poverty. This shallow public engagement with development arguably found its most visible expression in the Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign and its related events in 2005.

            On 2 July 2005, 220,000 protestors convened in Edinburgh as part of a series of events organised as part of MPH, a coalition of charities, civil society groups, and faith organisations formed to campaign on key global issues like debt and poverty eradication. The Edinburgh protest coincided with a Group of 8 leading industrialised countries summit held twenty miles away in Gleneagles. As the protestors completed walking laps of Edinburgh city centre shouting slogans in an upbeat atmosphere, the level of mobilisation was impressive but the outcomes questionable. While big promises were made at Gleneagles including a $50 billion aid package to Africa, they were subsequently not delivered upon. Among the development agency responses to the Gleneagles summit: the World Development Movement described it as ‘a disaster for the world’s poor’; ActionAid complained that ‘the G8 have completely failed to deliver trade justice’; Christian Aid described the summit as ‘a sad day for poor people in Africa and all over the world’; and Oxfam lamented that ‘neither the necessary sense of urgency nor the historic potential of Gleneagles was grasped by the G8’ (Guardian, 6 September 2005).

            Make Poverty History succeeded on the level of clearly communicating the need for change and highlighting some of the key issues that needed addressing but it failed in sustaining the participation of the hundreds of thousands who donned the white wristbands and took to the streets.  A Eurobarometer poll in 2005 showed that despite the enhanced media coverage and increased public awareness of global poverty generated by Make Poverty History, Live8 concerts, and Gleneagles Summit, a total of 88 per cent of EU citizens cited no knowledge of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (Eurobarometer, 2005). The MDGs are the central plank of development policy for the world’s leading industrialised countries and the low level of public awareness of the goals reflected in this poll suggests that development organisations and governments alike have been largely unsuccessful in capturing civil society involvement in achieving the targets.

            A Department for International Development (DfID)-commissioned poll in 2010 measuring public (adults over 16 years) attitudes to development shows that the proportion of the public who say they are very concerned about global poverty has declined from a peak of 32 per cent around the time of Make Poverty History to 25 per cent today. The percentage of the public describing themselves as ‘active enthusiasts’ in the area of international development declined from 18 per cent in 2008 to 14 per cent in 2010 while, in the same period, the percentage of respondents who thought ‘most aid is wasted’ increased from 47 per cent to 53 per cent. The percentage of respondents concerned about global poverty remained solidly high (74 per cent in 2008 and 73 per cent in 2010) which suggests that the public lack the knowledge and understanding of international development to meaningfully address relevant issues and move from a position of concern to one of individual or communal action (TNS, 2010). 

Make Poverty History appeared to be an example of what Freire (1972) described as pure activism (action without reflection) rather than the more sustained engagement with the learner inherent in praxis (reflection and action) which had the power ‘to negate accepted limits and open the way to a new future’ (ibid.:11). Key questions arising from the recent surveys on public attitudes to development are how to engage civil society at the kind of level likely to result in dialogical action, and what role development NGOs can play in this process?

The Irish financial crisis – where was the development sector?

Bebbington et al. suggest that ‘NGOs are only NGOs in any politically meaningful sense of the term if they are offering alternatives to dominant models, practices and ideas about development’ (2008:3). This more politically-oriented role is problematic for many NGOs, particularly in the development sector where they tend to focus on the domestic policy arena only insofar as it impacts on overseas aid and development policy. Economic policy-making and social development in the national context is largely devolved to NGOs with a local or specialist focus in the domestic arena. However, the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent sharp contraction of the Irish economy resulting in an €85 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) shows how the national and global frequently collide (Irish Times, 28 November 2010).  For example the same economic mismanagement that cost the Irish taxpayer between €29 and €34 billion to bail out Anglo Irish Bank (Guardian, 30 September 2010), also resulted in cuts totaling €224 million from the overseas aid budget in 2009 (Dochas, 10 December 2009). 

            While the development sector launched a campaign to engage public support for the aid budget and prevent further cuts (www.actnow2015.ie), it has stopped short of locating the cuts within the wider economic malaise impacting on Irish society.  To critique the cuts in aid without analysing and attempting to address the underlying social, economic and political crisis underpinning those cuts severely limits the role of NGOs as critical friends of government and active agents of social equality at home and overseas. Bebbington, et al. believe that:

“NGOs can and must re-engage with the project of seeking alternative development futures for the world’s poorest and more marginal. This will require clearer analysis of the contemporary problems of uneven development, and a clear understanding of the types of alliances NGOs need to construct with other actors in civil society if they are to mount a credible challenge to disempowering processes of economic, social and political development” (2008:3).

One of the lessons of Make Poverty History is that the alliance of civil society movements involved in the campaign lacked a development education component that could have supported a more critical analysis of the issues tackled by MPH. Similarly, development education organisations with the capacity to provide critical literacy skills and a deeper understanding of development did not sufficiently engage with the campaign and its mobilisation of the public.

            However, there is a striking recent example of an organisation that has attempted to connect the current economic crisis in Ireland to the global South. In December 2010, Action from Ireland (Afri) published a paper on the IMF’s intervention in Ireland ‘based on the experience of global justice organisations that have long monitored the impact of IMF policies in the Global South’. The paper argues that the IMF deal ‘[L]ocks Ireland into a very specific neo-liberal economic model dominated by policies which impose suffering on the less well off in Irish society’. Drawing upon examples of the IMF’s – arguably disastrous — interventions in the global South, the paper argues for a defaulting on the bank debt, ‘an option that it is imperative be exercised on the grounds of both justice and economic sustainability’ (Afri, 2010).  Thus, Afri is squarely addressing a fundamental and momentous generational question for the Irish people based on compelling evidence from the global South.