The GAO released a follow up report on US public diplomacy today (the earlier report was from April 2005). While the report does not assess the BBG projects al-Hurra and Radio Sawa (it says that these are the subject of another investigation), it does offer a somewhat disheartening picture of how official rhetoric on improving public diplomacy has translated into practice.
Some of the key findings of the GAO report:
- the State Department has significantly increased funds for public diplomacy aimed at the Muslim world. The Arab world only ranks third among increased regional bureau budgets, though: the Near East increased by 25% between 2004 and 2006, compared to 39% for South Asia and 28% for East Asia and the Pacific. And despite Condi's "transformation diplomacy", public diplomacy efforts are still concentrated in Europe and Eurasia: $198 million in funding for 2004 and $229 million for 2006, with 192 "authorized officers"; compared to $69 million (2004) and $86 million (2006), and 66 "authorized officers" (increased to 68 for 2006) for the Near East. The GAO says that State officials expect about 75 Foreign Service officials, including about 25 Public Affairs Officers, to be transferred from Europe to other regions... but it hadn't happened yet as of this report: over the last three years, it reports, "the number of authorized overseas positions in all regional bureaus increased slightly or not at all."
- security fears seriously complicate the efforts of Public Affairs Officers in many Muslim countries: "security and budgetary concerns have forced embassies to close publicly accessible facilities and curtail certain public outreach efforts, sending foreign publics the unintended message that the United States is unapproachable." Hard to know exactly what to do about that, because the security risks are all too real - but it's important to note, particularly for those who believe that the face to face level is the key to successful public diplomacy.
- and even if they did get out into the field, "State's data show that as many as 30 percent of public diplomacy positions in countries with significant Muslim populations are filled by officers with insufficient language skills." The number was 36% in Arabic speaking posts.
- The Shared Values Initiative launched in 2002 is now defunct.
- Hi Magazine launched in 2003 is now defunct. The report quotes an official in Egypt reporting that "of the 2,500 copies the embassy distributed monthly to newsstands in Cairo, often as many as 2,000 were returned unsold."
- "American Corners", an attempt to re-establish some kind of open space for locals to come visit and interact by placing them in non-embassy space and staffing them with locals, are a decent idea, though no panacea. Number opened in Egypt, according to the report: 0. (2 are planned). A more official American-run office in Alexandria gets higher marks. But again the security fears - and the intimidation and resentment created by the measures taken to protect the Embassies - make it hard to figure out good solutions.
- The GAO report revisits a long series of such criticisms that public diplomacy fails to live up to private sector best practices. I'm always a bit skeptical of recommendations which involve upping the jargon and bureaucracy quotient, but that's what the GAO says. Some of its components seem like good sense, others, well... MEGO.
While the report notes that initiatives by Condoleeza Rice and Karen Hughes are in their early stages and can't yet be evaluated, this sums up its frank look at what existed as of February of this year. In its response to the GAO report, the State Department notes the recent Hughes-driven changes and claims to be well on the way to meeting some of the critiques. We'll see if the next GAO report reveals payoffs on these changes.
Even though it doesn't investigate its effectiveness, the GAO report does offer some hints as to the extent to which al-Hurra has in fact become a white elephant, sucking up scarce resources. In the 2004-2006 period, it estimates the amount spent by the Broadcasting Board of Governors on al-Hurra and Radio Sawa at $240 million. For comparison's sake, the total State Department public diplomacy budget for FY2005 was $597 million, with $356 million of that going to fund exchange programs - which is great, since exchange programs are an extremely valuable public diplomacy tool - leaving $241 million for everything else. At another point (p.20), inadequacies in the strategic communication dimension of public diplomacy are explained in part by the fact that "research and evaluation efforts to inform all facets of strategic communications are limited by the relatively small budget in Washington DC allocated to such efforts."
Budgets like that go a long way to explaining (a) why al-Hurra isn't just something which all else equal we might as well have (because all else isn't equal; and I'm looking forward with some interest to the GAO report on al-Hurra); and (b) why the Pentagon, with its vast budgets, is muscling into the public diplomacy territory which should clearly be the State Department's responsibility (with particularly and predictably bad results given the Pentagon's evident inability to distinguish between public diplomacy and PsyOps.)
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