A growing number of donor governments have slashed their Official Development Assistance (ODA) budgets in recent years. Despite polling showing consistently high public support for development, these cuts have been met with little to no public resistance. In this context, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) commissioned Public First to deliver an in-depth research project exploring what really drives public opinion on development across a set of countries.
We conducted polling in 5 countries (France, Italy, Ireland, Japan, and Brazil) to better understand the forces driving public opinion as well as rigorously test public support for development and multilateralism. We complemented this quantitative research with focus groups in 2 countries (France and Italy) to explore some of the findings in more depth with key voter groups – right-wing voters and centrist voters.
We found that across every country we examined, the same upstream forces are doing most of the work in shaping public attitudes to development and multilateralism: people are anxious about their domestic economies, sceptical that politicians will deliver for them, and feel increasingly detached from one another.
Set against that backdrop, support for development in principle remains surprisingly robust, but it collapses quickly when people are asked to prioritise between competing domestic and international claims on limited public resources. Reforming messages or shifting development spending priorities helps only at the margins. The binding constraints are low trust and domestic pressure on living standards – ultimately, our research suggests that advocacy strategies to build public support for development will only be effective if they take this wider context into account.
You can read the full report here, or explore the individual country chapters and data below:
France:
Italy:
Ireland:
Japan:
Brazil:
You can also access the desk review here, which underpins the primary research in this project. The desk review explores the political economy trends (i.e. on economics, inequality, demographics, and politics) and public opinion research over the past 25 years across 10 key countries: Germany, France, Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Japan, Italy, Qatar, Brazil and China.