Abstract
ABSTRACT We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed that sudden-onset, national news coverage can increase levels of emergency humanitarian aid allocated to a crisis. They said that this influence operated by triggering other accountability institutions (the public, civil society, elected officials) who put pressure on aid bureaucracies to announce additional funding. However, these practitioners claim that annual humanitarian aid allocations—which are much larger—are unaffected by news pressure. Intriguingly, we also find that many respondents interpret a lack of news coverage as grounds for increasing their annual aid allocations to what they call “forgotten crises”. We argue that “bureaucratic mediatisation”, rather than the “CNN Effect” or the “Cockroach Effect”, provides the most appropriate theoretical perspective to understand these multiple, concurrent and indirect forms of media influence. These findings have important implications for government donors, news organisations and aid agencies, and for our wider understanding of how news coverage may influence foreign policy.
Highlights
Financing for appeals related to crises in Zimbabwe (26%), Venezuela (24%) and South Sudan (10%) (FTS 2021)
Questions remain about the causal pathways through which such media influence might operate: whether via the “CNN Effect” (Livingston 1997), the “Cockroach Effect” or, as we suggest, via “bureaucratic mediatisation”—defined here as the process by which bureaucracies adapt to the rules, norms and values of the media (Hjarvard 2008)
Most of the policymakers we interviewed told us that sudden-onset, national news coverage of humanitarian crises creates a pressure on aid bureaucracies that can lead to an increase in emergency humanitarian aid allocations to specific crises
Summary
Financing for appeals related to crises in Zimbabwe (26%), Venezuela (24%) and South Sudan (10%) (FTS 2021). There have been no systematic studies examining these questions from the perspective of the policymakers involved in such decision-making, despite the growing interest in the roles played by bureaucrats within complex systems of governance (e.g., Raudla, Douglas, and Mohr 2021; Thorbjørnsrud, Figenschou, and Ihlen 2014) To address these issues, and to further our understanding of the influence of news coverage on aid policy, we present the findings of 30 in-depth interviews with senior bureaucrats working at 16 of the largest, democratic, humanitarian donor countries. The bureaucrats we interviewed often believed that the annual aid allocations of other governments were heavily influenced by news coverage This perception led some donors to try to compensate by allocating additional funding to under-reported crises in what we call the “forgotten crisis” effect. Even when aid allocations were seemingly insulated from media pressure, news coverage appears to indirectly influence outcomes
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