Finding frames: new ways to engage the UK public in global poverty

The aim of the study was to explore the potential for frames theory to be used as a practical tool to re-engage the UK public in global poverty. In exploring the uses of frames theory, we have built on work by Tom Crompton at WWF-UK, who began the task of linking values to frames and thereby suggesting new ways forward for engaging the public in environmental issues and actions. An important finding from his Common Cause paper is that there is a common set of values that can motivate people to tackle a range of ‘bigger than self’ problems, including the environment and global poverty. The implication is that large coalitions can – and must – be built across third- sector organisations to bring about a values change in society. This report responds to that call. The basic argument of this paper is that there is a problem in terms of the UK public’s levels of engagement with global poverty. Simply put, people in the UK understand and relate to global poverty no differently now than they did in the 1980s. This is the case despite massive campaigns such as the Jubilee 2000 debt initiative and Make Poverty History; the widespread adoption and mainstreaming of digital communication techniques and social networks; steady growth in NGO fundraising revenues; the entire Millennium Development Goal story; and the establishment of a Westminster consensus on core elements of development policy. By many measures we have made amazing strides forward in recent years, but the public have largely been left behind. The result is that we operate within social and, by extension, political conditions that are precarious in the immediate term and incommensurate to the challenges of poverty and climate change in the medium and long term. This study looks at what can be learned from values (the guiding principles that individuals use to judge situations and determine their courses of action) and frames (the chunks of factual and procedural knowledge in the mind with which we understand situations, ideas and discourses in everyday life). Values and frames offer ways to look at the problem of public engagement with global poverty and to identify possible solutions. If we apply values and frames theory to the question of how to re-engage the public, we come up with some compelling insights into the impact of our existing practices and some striking solutions to the problems that these reveal. They may not be perfect solutions, and they bring with them significant challenges. But we believe they offer something valuable and timely: a fresh perspective. The persistent problem of public engagement suggests it is time for the development sector to transform its practices radically. Values and frames offer pathways to potential solutions that should be debated across the sector, and no

The Brissot Dossier

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Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature

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Review of The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794

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Writing News and Telling Stories

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Collecting and Researching in the History of Books

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Discourse and Diffusion

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How Historians Play God

This essay recounts the career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the leader of the Girondists during the French Revolution, in a manner designed to pose questions about the nature of historical research in general. How, in piecing together information taken from scraps of paper, do historians come to an understanding of other lives? Put in the abstract, the problem belongs to epistemology or ethics. Confronted in practice, it is more like the puzzles uncovered by archaeologists. The historian digs out a shard of evidence from the archives and asks: was Brissot, the ultimate idealist, a spy for the police? By stepping in and out of layers of time, the historian is actually playing a deeper game, one that he or she may be reluctant to admit.Histor

Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: Communication Circuits in Eighteenth-Century France

In 1745 a chambermaid in Versailles was shut up in the Bastille for publishing a roman à clef about the sex life of Louis XV. In attempting to get to the bottom of the case, the police uncovered some remarkable information about how oral media and print culture intersected. Their investigation opens up some broad issues related to the history of women, authorship, reading, and public opinion.Histor

The Devil in the Holy Water: Political Libel in Eighteenth-Century France

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