International aid and the media: Improving the effectiveness of aid allocations

在旷日持久的冲突、2019冠状病毒病大流行和气候变化影响的推动下，世界各地需要人道主义援助的人数正在迅速增加。不幸的是，由于许多捐助国的民粹主义政治力量不断增强，加上全球经济不确定性不断加深，捐助国政府维持目前人道主义支出水平的意愿和能力正面临越来越大的压力。因此，自2010年以来，联合国人道主义应对计划平均只满足了60%的资金需求。不同人道主义危机收到的资金数额也存在巨大差异。例如，在2020年，联合国的一些呼吁几乎得到了全部支持，例如伊拉克（92%）和黎巴嫩（84%）。相比之下，津巴布韦（26%）和南苏丹（10%）的危机融资相对很少，导致粮食配给大幅削减。我们之前的获奖研究表明，新闻报道是造成政府援助预算不足和分配不均的关键因素之一。它还揭示了援助官僚机构内部的两个具体误解和知识差距，这些误解和知识差距对他们的决策产生了负面影响。首先，我们发现，突如其来的全国性新闻报道可以将援助支出转移到某些国家——即使未满足需求的水平并不需要这样做——而这是由一种误解所驱动的，即主流新闻报道是公众支持援助支出的可靠指标。其次，我们的研究表明，政策制定者往往不知道专业的人道主义新闻机构，这些机构提供了更多最新的、深入的、背景化的信息，这些信息将帮助他们做出更多基于需求的援助分配。决策者还可以战略性地利用这种专家报道来抵制不受欢迎的政治压力，使其偏离基于需求的援助分配决策。不幸的是，专门的人道主义新闻工作长期资金不足，因此将从政府捐助者本身的进一步财政支持中受益匪浅。在这个项目中，我们的目标是纠正这些误解和知识差距，从而有助于确保人道主义援助花在最需要的地方。我们将在12个月的时间里，在至少12个最大的政府援助捐助国的高级政策制定者中传播我们的研究结果，从而实现这一目标。我们将通过非公开会议、公开演讲和多方利益相关者研讨会等方式与他们接触。这是可能的，因为我们在这一领域大大扩展了专业网络，包括与联合国开发计划署（UNDP）等主要联合国机构的专业网络，这些机构与所有主要捐助者都有长期的关系。为了帮助我们向政策制定者解释我们的研究结果，我们将制作一系列创造性资源，包括联合制作的视频和政策简报，以及一些信息图表和插图。这些将与我们的指导委员会合作设计，以帮助确保其适用性。这些材料也将通过我们现有的网络、在线存在和开放获取的Future Learn课程广泛传播。我们对实现我们计划的影响的能力非常有信心，因为我们已经成功地影响了政府的援助支出，这是最近另一个研究项目的一部分。我们也已经帮助说服私人基金会增加它们对人道主义新闻专业形式的支持——在不损害其独立性的情况下——作为原始项目的一部分。在我们最初的研究项目中，我们没有针对政府捐助者，因为当时我们没有预料到我们的发现对他们有多大的相关性，也没有足够的手段来获取它们。

The number of people around the world in need of humanitarian assistance is escalating rapidly - driven by protracted conflicts, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, donor governments' willingness and ability to maintain even current levels of humanitarian spending is under increasing strain due to growing populist political forces in many donor countries, alongside deepening global economic uncertainty. As a result, since 2010, UN humanitarian response plans have, on average, only had 60% of their funding needs met. There are also huge disparities in the amount of funding different humanitarian crises receive. For example, in 2020, some UN appeals were almost fully supported, such as for Iraq (92%) and Lebanon (84%). By contrast, there was relatively very little financing for crises in Zimbabwe (26%) and South Sudan (10%) - leading to significant cuts to food rations. Our previous, award-winning research demonstrated that news coverage is one of the key factors shaping government's inadequate and unevenly distributed aid budgets. It also revealed two specific misperceptions and knowledge gaps within aid bureaucracies that negatively affect their decision-making. First, we found that sudden-onset, national news coverage can divert aid spending towards certain countries - even when the level of unmet need does not require it - and that this is driven by the misperception that mainstream news coverage is a reliable indicator of public support for aid spending. Second, our research revealed that policy makers are often unaware of specialist humanitarian news organisations, which provide more up-to-date, in-depth, and contextualised information that would help them to make more needs-based aid allocations. Such specialist coverage can also be used strategically by policy makers to resist unwelcome political pressure to deviate from needs-based aid allocation decisions. Unfortunately, specialised humanitarian journalism is chronically under-funded and would therefore benefit greatly from further financial support from government donors themselves. In this project, we aim to correct these misperceptions and knowledge gaps and thereby contribute to ensuring that humanitarian aid is spent where it is needed most. We will achieve this by disseminating our research findings amongst senior policy makers within at least twelve of the largest government aid donors, over a twelve-month period. We will engage with them though a combination of private meetings, public presentations, and multi-stakeholder workshops. This is possible because of our significantly expanded professional networks within this field, including with key UN agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) - which have longstanding relationships with all major donors.To help us to explain our research findings to policymakers, we will produce a range of creative resources including a co-produced video and policy brief, and several infographics and illustrations. These will be designed in collaboration with our steering committee to help ensure their suitability. These materials will also be disseminated widely via our existing networks, online presence and an open-access Future Learn course.We are very confident in our ability to achieve our planned impacts as we have already successfully influenced governments' aid spending as part of another recent research project. We have also already helped to persuade private foundations to increase their support for specialist forms of humanitarian journalism - without compromising its independence - as part of the original project. We did not target government donors within our original research project because, at the time, we did not anticipate how relevant our findings would be for them nor have sufficient means to access them.