An interesting piece on public opinion towards international development published on Left Foot Forward today. The gist is unsurprising: there's growing support for reducing UK overseas aid, bringing the Lord's into line with public opinion on this one. Similar evidence on shifting public opinion was published in Foreign Policy recently.

It seems that dwindling support for ODA correlates with the belief that ODA is ineffective and, perversely, that development is the rich world's burden.

They also cite an IPPR/ODI seminar on international development and public opinion (drawing in experts on int dev and cog sci??). Will try to get more info on this soon.

But this does raise at least one question though. Given that scepticism of aid effectiveness is one of the driving factors here, one would think that communication of evaluation results would help. But impact evaluations don't exactly tug the heart strings. Are there any lessons from cog sci of emotions that are pertinent to the statistics versus case studies debate? There must be something in Goldie or Gigerenzer and Todd on this.