Beyond Zero-Sum in the New Normal – How does advocacy, communications, and fundraising need to change post-pandemic?

By Joanna Mikulski and Katri Bertram 

The Covid-19 pandemic is reinforcing in a stark way how interconnected our societies and challenges are. A functioning and prosperous economy and society depends on having a strong and inclusive public health system and political leaders capable of implementing sound measures to control the spread of a virus. Immigration, labor and education policies impact whether the health system has skilled workers needed to respond – and health and safety regulations and equipment in place to protect them. Trade, industrial and development policies impact whether countries can continue to provide their populations with essential supplies. Social policies determine whether sick days, child care, and income loss are covered. The quality of the air we breathe impacts our health and ability to recover from infection. Furthermore, forest loss makes future pandemics like Covid-19 more likely. 

Yet, despite the clear interconnections, much of the discourse about the pandemic and returning to a “new normal” has focused on opposing choices. Should governments protect the health of people or that of the economy? Should donors and international organisations fund programs to deal with the pandemic or invest in efforts to combat climate change? Should governments and companies protect workers’ health, or focus on their businesses survival? Is the health sector essential, but education and food supply not? 

These are not either/or questions. Rather, it is a question of finding the right balance for different phases of a crisis, and different contexts. As professionals who have worked across government, NGOs, international organisations, and philanthropy, we’re not surprised by the zero-sum approaches. Most policy analysis is highly specialized, but also fragmented and siloed. The same applies to decision-making, as well as budgeting. It is difficult to break these silos, as entire institutions have been set up accordingly. To support policy analysis, decision making, and budgeting in a way that best addresses complex challenges, we propose that a key first step is changing our narratives. That starts with how advocacy, communications, and fundraising campaigns are conducted.  

We have advised a wide range of organisations on how to advocate to increase political priority and funding for their issues. These have included organisations working to prevent violence; ensure children and mothers have enough healthy food to eat; bring universal health coverage to their countries; stop climate change; and support early childhood development. Leaders working on each of these issues should be allies. But too often, they’re not. Some truly believe that their issue is the most vital issue – which deserves the most attention or funding. Other leaders acknowledge that their success depends on the success of those working on other challenges. But their advocacy, communications and fundraising often tells another story, putting their issue – whether it’s nutrition, health, education or something else – in competition for attention with government, donors and others. And it’s not just competition among, but also within, sectors. Covid-19 is likely to bring more emphasis to diseases – perhaps at the expense of support for health systems and other sectors.   

We have felt pressure to reinforce these silos. When everyone wants their issue to get the most funding and attention, it’s easier to design a narrow issue-specific campaign than engage in the hard work of figuring out how to work and advocate together to solve complex problems. Our contracts and performance measures often reinforce the same. It’s common for leaders advocating for integrated action to come under fire from those seeking to protect their siloed turf. For example, advocates for the Green New Deal in the U.S. have gotten resistance for arguing that the climate crisis cannot be addressed without also addressing the interlinked crises of racial and economic inequality. Similarly, global health advocates trying to include nutrition policy as a driver of preventable deaths or ill health often get push back from the traditional health community, who fear that disease-specific or medical interventions would get lost or deprioritized. The result is zero-sum competition for budgets, incoherent and fragmented policies and operationalization, and ultimately less impact, and fewer lives saved.

Leaders working in all sectors are likely entering a moment where the apparent incentives to reinforce silos will – also in the face of scarcer budgets and in many countries ahead of elections – be stronger than ever. Governments and other donors are likely to tighten budgets in the face of the economic fallout from the pandemic – creating an incentive to fall back on “my issue first”. But the reality will continue to be that we will contain Covid-19, have more impact, and build back our systems better and more coherently by working together. 

So how should advocacy, communications and fundraising support collaboration in this new moment? We offer a few broad suggestions below, but we’re looking for your input and specific examples of what advocacy, communications and fundraising should look like in a new and better normal. 

• Advocate for people, not issues. Leaders working in policy and development tend to think in issue silos (at least professionally). But people tend to tell stories about our lives and the challenges we face in holistic ways. Centering advocacy on people instead of issues helps to avoid language suggesting that any one issue or sector is the silver bullet to all problems. It also helps convene representatives from different sectors or ministries – and explicitly advocate for shared planning, budgeting and accountability mechanisms across decision-making and budgeting.

• Communicate about intersections between issues. Recognize the importance of other issues, and their interconnectedness to your primary issue. Even if it’s a secondary message, communicate and campaign in a way that is not zero-sum. Leaders should also pay attention to how their technical language can shut others out. Partner across sectors, and include partners who have more freedom to message across sectors or beyond limited funding lines (e.g. academia and think tanks).  

• Fundraise and collaborate in a way that expands the pie for all. Another answer may be to focus more on broad-based policies to increase the amount of funding available for all – like campaigns to increase the total amount of funding for development rather than the amount available for a specific issue. 

Covid-19 provides a historical opportunity to do things differently. We can decide to work together for more impact for all people, society and the global economy, or we can blindly defend our silos at the cost of everything else. 

As advocacy, communications and fundraising specialists, we believe our community can support and develop a more coherent, collaborative narrative and ways of working. Are we – and are our funders – ready to go down this new path?

Please share in our comments section or through social media examples where collaborative advocacy, communication, and fundraising is already taking place. We and our community would love to learn from best practices. 

Global Health Impact. What are we trying to achieve with the Covid19 response, and what happens if we fail?

Many of us who work in global health are motivated to work on what we do because we believe that we can save lives. Lives lost to preventable diseases, to malnutrition, and to lack of access to quality health care for every single person. Lives lost not because we haven’t figured out a vaccine, treatment, prevention, or care, but because we have a huge injustice in how these “life-savers” are distributed.

We are also motivated because we find unnecessary suffering intolerable. As with lives saved, if there is a way to prevent suffering, to cure it, to ease it, why would we not try to provide it to everyone?

Some of us want to save and impact as many lives as possible. Others see the value in every single life, no matter whether it is a rare disease or affliction that impacts only a few people in the world. Sometimes, the prior motivation has already led to the latter in terms of numbers (for example in the case of polio), but the threat of a new epidemic that threatens all lives lies dormant.

Some of us are also motivated because we not only want to save lives or prevent unnecessary suffering, but because we want to prolong lives, and the quality of life lived.

Some of us work on health threats to our own lives, livelihoods, and way of life. Covid19 shows that people appear to be most willing to act, invest billions of dollars, and change our daily lives significantly for this reason. We do not seem to feel the same urgency, or to care as much in the cases above.

I have been thinking about John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” again a lot recently. I read Rawls as a young undergraduate, and have been motivated greatly in my work by his writing, as well as many others, such as Amartya Sen. Rawls tackles the question of inequality through a thought experiment. Imagine you would not know who you would be born as, or where. Would you, in your current situation, be more interested in the life chances of those everywhere, anywhere – if that “someone far away” could be you?

If you and your loved ones were threatened or infected by Covid19 – let’s say in Yemen, Syria, or Venezuela – instead of where you currently live, would you be more worried, and wish the world would be helping more? And what if your infant, whom you are struggling to feed, were threatened by a famine? Or you were pregnant during flight from war?

Nearly every person on this planet is currently affected by Covid19. Some do not feel personally threatened, many are not worried. But we know that millions of people are at risk to die, and nearly 200,000 people have already been recorded dead (with many more likely to have died, and many, many more from indirect causes, such as lack of access to health care for other emergencies or diseases).

When we feel directly threatened, or can empasize with other people under threat, we go into “humanitarian crisis mode“. Help. Now. Immediately. This is the current state of where many countries and people stand on Covid19. It’s as if a tsunami or earthquake had hit. We feel the need for immediate responses, and support.

As countries and their people start to realize that Covid19 won’t disappear for a while (not until a vaccine becomes universally available), we’re most likely to see a shift to “protracted crisis mode“. Life will not return to normal, but we will tire of monitoring every infection and death in other countries, most likely those where we live as well. Political leadership will find it more difficult to count on the goodwill of people to restrict their lives and raise emergency funds for a response, especially for other countries.

And if we get to a state where Covid19 eventually becomes endemic, possibly limited to certain geographies or affecting only certain populations, we will focus on other, more immediate issues again. We’ve seen this happen with HIV/AIDS, polio, and many other diseases that saw a flurry of media and public attention, funding, and research, which then slowly ebbed.

Fast forward, if we feel like this is a challenge that our own generation will not resolve, we will move to “inter-generational mode“, as most of us are doing with climate change. Shame if it kills our children or grandchildren, or those in countries far away, but at least it’s not killing us right now.

As with global health impact – whether lives saved, prolonged, quality improved, for many, for the few, for the rich, for all – our current response to Covid19 is highly fragmented. And I have not even raised the question of “how” in this post (i.e. should we have a targeted approach, focusing only on vaccine research in the richest countries, or strengthen primary health care systems in every country, or work through other sectors that impact health outcomes, such as education; should we collaborate and pool funds as much multilaterally, or count on individual private sector firms to compete and deliver; etc.).

Covid19 is just one more reminder how incredibly fragmented – or more positively put, heterogenous – we as a global health community are. As with global health impact over the past decades, we are unlikely to agree on the what, how and when in a global Covid19 response.

This does not mean we should not try to find collective – global – solutions. In the worst case, we stop debating, learning from each other, and helping each other. We stop pooling expertise, capacity and funds. We stop trying to harmonise responses. In other words, we give up on multilateral action. What then happens?

We are seeing this in some autocratic responses and countries already, where human rights, democracy and collaboration are being thrown out of the door. Do we really want to enter a global era where we do not only state (as German Chancellor Merkel recently did) that Covid19 is the greatest test to our societies since WWII, but that it opens the gateways to going even further back in history, to widespread nationalism, fascism, protectionism – and their consequences?