Agenda-setting and Donor Responsiveness to Humanitarian Crisis and Development Aid

In this 20-page document, the author describes the extended research efforts of developing the empirical and theoretical foundations needed to create a coherent explanation of the interconnections between media and aid. His analysis intends to develop a reliable explanation for how media, agenda setting, and donor responsiveness are intertwined. The document is part of the publication of papers for a conference on “The Role of the News Media in the Governance Reform Agenda", which was co-sponsored by the World Bank Communication for Governance and Accountability Program (CommGAP) and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Boston, United States (US).

Examining disaster aid, the author reports that "starting in roughly 1990, media coverage suddenly ceased to be a statistically significant influence on the humanitarian response to natural disasters." He works from the contextual information that CNN coverage of Somalia in the 1990's appeared to influence humanitarian aid there, a phenomenon seemingly repeated in Bosnia and elsewhere. To reconcile these apparent contradictions, the author examines agency theory. "Agency theory provides the key conceptual foundation for understanding why aid bureaucracies, or any bureaucratic system for that matter, will respond to media coverage." According to this theory, bureaucracies respond to political environments, which are influenced by media. Following that theory, the author describes a second theory in which "...to avoid the attention of the media, aid bureaucracies want to avoid providing too little aid to recipients that the public considers important, while also avoiding providing too much to recipients the public considers unimportant. This translates into a simple equation; more coverage means a recipient is more important and the more important the recipient, the more aid it should receive."

According to a statistical analysis from 1965-1990, "media coverage was the most robust and most consistent influence upon the aid commitment." The study showed that the quality of content of media reporting was not a significant factor. "The media salience of a recipient country, regardless of the content of that coverage, provides a consistent and significant but not overwhelming boost to development aid allocations."

However, more recent studies show a less direct and more complex relationship between media influence and aid allocations. The studies note a shift in the early 1990's, indicating that the influence of the media disappeared as a factor in disaster aid response, contrary to anecdotal evidence of what was termed the "CNN effect". Scholars suggest that as policy certainty decreases, news media influence increases and that, conversely, as policy becomes more certain, the influence of news media coverage is reduced. So rather than crediting the rise of rapidly available global media reporting (for example, the CNN network), in fact, government policy certainty or uncertainty is credited by the author with governing the degree of influence of media on aid. However, the author proposes that as foreign policy reconceptualisation was occurring at the end of the Cold War, media may have entered to provide a new conceptual and decision-making framework. The author tested this hypothesis and found that "the analysis exposed a profound disruption in the influence of the media at the end of the Cold War and that did not fit with either explanation for the CNN-effect." In fact, the analysis showed a drop in media influence after the Cold War. It showed that "[t]he decision making for each disaster [aid allocation] was still a rational, considered process, but the process was not consistent from one disaster to the next." The author extrapolates that in the post-Cold War policy period, characterised as an unstructured Ad Hoc period, cases of aid allocation were handled in a less-structured, harder-to-influence environment.

AS indicated here, this analysis leads to the possibility that 3 key elements are at work in the relationship of aid and media: the nature of the news environment; the nature of the international environment; and the mechanism through which coverage influences aid. The author suggests that in the news environment, the shift to a global media system is significant. It allows for the media, through public influence on elected officials, to stimulate the allocation of crisis aid. The action of executives (presidents, prime ministers) he calls the "executive mechanism", representing a shift from bureaucratic mechanisms of distribution. As the Ad Hoc period passed, a new international environment structured around the War on Terror ended the policy uncertainty. Statistical significance of the influence of media on humanitarian aid seems to have returned, according to the author’s analysis.

The document concludes that: "Without a clear understanding of what factors are likely to be important in the current global political structure there is no way to know what might be the right combination of factors we need to use to sort out just how much news coverage matters. Still, with the information currently available it appears that the bureaucratic responsiveness mechanism is smaller than it was during the Cold War, but it is clearly there and it functions in parallel to the executive mechanism. Thus, it is probably wise to formulate policy and other actions with the expectation that every bit of news coverage in donor nations creates a small increase in aid response and the occasional flood of coverage of a major disaster is likely to generate a massive response."