How Public Diplomacy Works: The Logic of PD

To achieve U.S. policy objectives, advance long-term goals, and promote U.S. national
interests, the modern public diplomacy section must be able to plan and implement PD interventions to affect the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of priority foreign audiences. To do this, PD practitioners engage with foreign audiences that hold a range of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to U.S. foreign policy interests and who live in countries that are friends, allies, partners, competitors, and adversaries to the United States. These high-level alignments then are translated into day-to-day, on-the-ground interactions. PD professionals interact with a variety of foreign audiences in immediate ways, both in deliberate, planned contexts and in responding to events and news around the world in ways that are consistent with U.S. policy, interests, and values. But these immediate interactions take place in information environments that may be shaped for years, and toward policy goals that may be decades in the making.

For the United States, public diplomacy advances U.S. foreign policy goals by shaping information and policy-making environments for international actors, affecting the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of foreign public audiences, and integrating our understanding of public needs and interests into effective policymaking. These ends are accomplished in four primary ways: by understanding, informing, influencing, and building relationships with selected foreign public audiences to achieve carefully chosen PD outcomes through a specific set of means: that is, the set of public diplomacy tools, programs, messages and interventions available to practitioners. Each of these elements of PD strategy is described in depth below.

A. The goals (ends) of public diplomacy

For the United States, public diplomacy seeks to accomplish three primary goals, with the ultimate aim of advancing U.S. interests and foreign policy priorities:
1. affect attitudes or behavior among specific public audiences to support or advance specific U.S. foreign policy priorities;
2. create conditions in policy and information environments that support U.S. interests or deny our adversaries’ interests; and
3. integrate a deep understanding of foreign publics and their interests into more effective U.S. foreign policy.

The most direct public diplomacy engagements seek to persuade selected audiences to take specific actions that support U.S. foreign policy objectives, as defined in strategic guidance documents such as the National Security Strategy or a mission’s Integrated Country Strategy. In less direct forms, public diplomacy seeks to shape a foreign actor’s information and policymaking environment, enabling an actor to take or refrain from taking specific actions. This goal is often accomplished by improving U.S. credibility or legitimacy on a specific issue, or weakening a competitor’s credibility or legitimacy. Finally, public diplomacy is essential for ensuring that foreign publics’ interests and needs (and not just those of governments) are accounted for in the policymaking process. Understanding the specific policy objectives for a given issue is paramount for translating broad policy guidance into specific plans and implementing strategically-oriented public diplomacy work. This understanding and application enables PD to achieve policy goals through designing effective public engagement, influencing information environments, and shaping more effective policy.

[The State edition carries a graphic here, "How does PD work?", that did not come through the public conversion.]

B. The concepts (ways) of public diplomacy

As public diplomacy is an inherently rhetorical activity designed to affect foreign audiences’ values, beliefs, desires, and fears, its methods align roughly with those of effective rhetoric. Effective practitioners of public diplomacy analyze and understand their audiences to determine what kinds and combinations of appeals are most likely to be effective.
Information campaigns appeal to audiences logically by providing facts (logos, in traditional rhetoric). Influence campaigns often appeal to audiences' emotions (pathos). And building relationships relies upon establishing the credibility of the United States or its interlocutors (ethos). This section outlines four primary ways that practitioners engage with foreign public audiences in overt, attributable public engagement. Each of these engagements can be carefully selected for different audiences at different moments and may be used in combination with each other. In a particular communication context, for example, a PD section may be trying to inform and to influence, but these are distinct communication goals.

Understanding

Public diplomacy seeks to understand foreign audiences for two primary reasons. First, understanding audiences is critical to designing effective approaches to engagement that advance foreign policy objectives. Second, understanding audiences helps U.S. diplomats advise policymakers on decisions that affect both U.S. and foreign publics. Understanding is achieved through reciprocal communication with key audiences. Public diplomacy adopts a constructionist or constitutive model of communication, which asserts that communication results from interactions between participants to create and share meaning. Sophisticated listening requires practitioners to cultivate strategic empathy (that is, understanding another actor’s underlying motivations, interests, and constraints) and to engage in perspective-taking (that is, to see the world from another actor’s point of view).

Public diplomacy practitioners strive to understand foreign audiences by collecting, analyzing, and applying data and insights from all relevant information sources. Important sources of data and insights include national and regional public opinion surveys, focus groups and interviews, program participant questionnaires, participant observations, informal and formal meetings, program evaluations, and media data collected in-house or by independent experts. Locally employed PD staff can help to provide contextual insights based on their intimate knowledge of the host country. Professional analyses and in-house studies of host country communication patterns (e.g., social media sentiment analysis, content analysis of media reports, advertising trends, etc.) also offer insights into the perceptions of key audiences. Public diplomacy practitioners employ cross-cultural competence, critical analytical skills, and knowledge of the local language and environment to develop a sophisticated understanding of foreign audiences; these abilities also enable them to maintain personal relationships with key audience members and influencers and to tap into local networks.

Informing

PD practitioners engage foreign audiences to explain U.S. policy and U.S. values and, through providing accurate information, build support for them. Public diplomacy seeks to frame and shape media and public discourse to the benefit of the United States and its interests. Public diplomacy practitioners articulate official policy to inform foreign audiences. What distinguishes the inform mechanism from others is a commitment to accuracy, transparency, and objectivity. Historically, the United States has invested significant resources in PD programs and projects that serve to inform foreign publics, especially through broadcast mechanisms such as Voice of America and other global platforms such as its flagship social media handles.

Thus, informing also works to advance professed U.S. values (e.g., truth and freedom of the press) and builds credibility and trust in the United States by providing access to accurate information in a variety of formats. For example, a speaker series may feature experts on a salient policy topic. Programs designed for youth engagement may also use sports or the arts to convey information about civic engagement or preventing violence. Social and traditional media facilitate sharing information about the visa application process and explaining a U.S. position. Providing information access can also advance free and open information environments, which is crucial to providing counter-narratives and informing audiences in hostile information environments.

Influencing

In addition to informing foreign public audiences, many public diplomacy initiatives and activities are designed to persuade and influence their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Public diplomacy aims to build support among foreign publics for U.S. policy goals and objectives directly, and fosters local conditions conducive to the advancement of U.S. policy goals by encouraging foreign publics to pressure their government to take positions that align with U.S. foreign policy goals, interests, and values. The U.S. Government also works to influence foreign publics through indirect engagement, by cultivating key influencers for specific audiences. The U.S. Government may not always be the best messenger for important communication, in which case advocates and influencers have the potential to amplify the United States’ reach and effectiveness. Building support through communication is most effective in an atmosphere of trust and in the context of genuine relationships. Developing trust in U.S. leadership among foreign publics increases the effectiveness of persuasion and influence.

Building Relationships

Relationships with foreign public audiences are at the core of public diplomacy’s capacity to understand, inform, and influence. Public diplomacy aims to build multiple types of relationships between individuals (e.g., academic and professional exchanges); groups of individuals or networks (e.g. informal networks based on interest or experience; formal networks, such as societies or associations); and organizations (e.g., universities, cities and municipalities, nongovernmental organizations, cultural institutions). Public diplomacy practitioners also develop relationships with journalists and other press and media organizations; cultivating these relationships is essential for successful public diplomacy work.

Public diplomacy also plays a role in building and maintaining government-to-government relationships with select branches of foreign governments (e.g., ministries of information, education, or culture) that shape, and sometimes control, the way their citizens perceive the United States. For example, many public diplomacy programs are coordinated with one of these ministries, such as binational commissions for the Fulbright Program, and a public diplomacy professional may be a direct liaison with an official from the ministry of education. If educational and cultural programs are administered and supported by the national government, the United States may find itself with direct interests in how the education system shapes students’ views of the world and of the United States. Similarly, a public diplomacy officer may work with a ministry of foreign affairs official to coordinate messaging on a bilateral agreement or a meeting between high-level officials. Thus, public diplomacy practitioners may act as formal or informal contacts with government officials with particular portfolios related to education, culture, and information.

C. Translating PD concepts (ways) into PD outcomes (ends)

In the course of understanding, informing, influencing, and building relationships, public
diplomacy initiatives and activities pursue a common set of PD outcomes. These outcomes describe the effects of a program or intervention. They are pathways toward achieving the primary ends, that is, advancing U.S. foreign policy, described above. These are the specific contributions that PD makes to achieving broader foreign policy objectives or advancing broader foreign policy priorities. They include:

• Raising Awareness: Increasing a foreign public’s knowledge of specific facts or information.
• Affecting Attitudes: Reinforcing, changing, or diminishing an idea, perception, belief, or feeling held by a foreign public.
• Affecting Behaviors: Prompting a foreign public to take (or stop taking) a specified action, or to increase (or decrease) the frequency of a specified action.
• Relationship Building: Establishing or strengthening relationships between people or groups of people. These relationships may be between U.S. Government staff and a foreign public, between people in the United States and another country, or between foreign publics.
• Organizational Partnership: Establishing or strengthening a relationship between institutions or groups of institutions. These partnerships are situated institutionally rather than personally, and may be between a government and various civil society organizations, cities or provinces, non-profit organizations, universities and academic institutions, professional organizations, cultural institutions and museums, private organizations, and many others.
• Skill Building: Seeking to improve a foreign public audience’s proficiency with specific skills relevant to U.S. policy objectives, such as civic and economic participation, good governance, rule of law, or respect for human rights.