Getting the people part right: a report on the human resources dimension of U.S. public diplomacy.
Brown, John
Dozens of reports have appeared since 9/11 on the failure of U.S.
public diplomacy (PD) to improve America's standing in the world.
These reports, however, shed little light on the goals and status of
State Department employees in the PD career track. This unfortunate gap
in determining how public diplomacy practitioners can best carry out
their putative task--to understand, inform and influence overseas
publics in support of foreign policy objectives--has been filled by the
latest report of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, a
bipartisan panel created by Congress in 1948.
According to the Commission, the main problem with public diplomacy
from a personnel perspective is that the State Department expects PD
officers to be managers rather than communicators. Their work
requirement statements on employee evaluation reports (EERs), for
example, underscore that they have to "plan, develop and implement
programs," "oversee the operations," and "safeguard
classified information." Absent from the EERs, however, are basic
public diplomacy functions like "influence public discourse,"
"publish articles in newspapers and magazine," and
"lecture at major venues."
In order to make PD practitioners more effective, the report
recommends, among other matters, the following: "recruiting for the
public diplomacy career track in a more focused way; testing our
recruitees [sic] more thoroughly and methodically for their PD
instincts, knowledge and skills; training them more intensively in the
core PD skill-set of persuasive communication; and evaluating them more
on communication and less on administration." The commission also
argues that "bureaucratic constructs" like the PD area offices
at the State Department and the position of Public Affairs Officer (PAO)
at embassies abroad should be assessed as to their utility.
This important, thought provoking, and clearly written report
deserves wide dissemination. But, in my view, it can be faulted in two
ways. First, in its effort to underscore that PD officers are above all
communicators because of their mandate to persuade and influence
overseas interlocutors, it neglects the importance of listening and
explaining to host country nationals as elements in the practice of
public diplomacy. (For the many, often contradictory, dimensions of
public diplomacy, see my "The Purposes and Cross-Purposes of
American Public Diplomacy," American Diplomacy, August 15, 2002,
www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2002_07-09/brown_pubdipl/brown_pubdipl.html.)
Second, the report seems marked by an internal contradiction: while
arguing convincingly that public diplomats shouldn't be in-house
administrators cut off from the local audiences in the countries where
they serve, it nonetheless states the Commission is "troubled"
that "PD officers have not attained senior management positions in
the State Department."
www.state.gov/documents/organization/106297.pdf
By The United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (2008)
Reviewed by John Brown
