ABSTRACT
The aim of this marketing campaign is to sell to its citizens the idea of poverty eradication as a moral imperative of the British nation. It is the possession of this moral duty which in part defines the UK as ‘developed’ and purports to write this identity into the national consciousness. So, it is an internal campaign whose subject matter is the narration of the external world and a justification of the nation's activities in that world which it constructs, or brings home for UK consumption. Like Bhabha's description of nineteenth-century literature, the Developments magazine and development education brings ‘the world into the home’, the outside into ‘our’ domestic space, by describing how the home (policies and monies generated domestically) operate justifiably and successfully ‘out there’ in the world, where the DfID portrays itself as responding to ‘need’, a term invoking lack by which un/underdeveloped spaces are defined. In what follows I will read specific extracts from Developments magazine. As I said in Chapter 1, am not arguing that Developments is the only venue or most important venue of this marketing campaign, but it is one of the earliest manifestations of the marketing campaign and acts, along with the website and public access point, as the mouthpiece of DfID and a good representation of current mainstream thinking on development, and in addition makes a point of featuring DfID-funded projects. It is the promoting and packaging of DfID funded projects back to a national audience that is particularly intriguing, because it is a new feature of the new development agenda and its communicative strategy resonates with the new global communications culture generally and New Labour's approach to political communication in particular (Seldon, 2001).
