Celebrity Advocacy and International Development

The book examines the work of celebrity advocacy and lobbying in international poverty, inequality and development. Its purpose is to understand the alliances between celebrity and these good causes, how they function, their history, consequences, wider contexts and implications. It argues that we cannot understand the effects of celebrity advocacy or the growth of the celebrity-and-development industry without asking to whom it appeals and how it works.

The book explores three paradoxes of celebrity advocacy. First, that celebrity advocacy occupies a significant proportion of the public domain, but does so without engaging particularly well with much of the public. Second, that failure to engage the public does not really matter. Many people at the core of advocacy, and in the political and business elites whom the advocates are lobbying, simply do not notice any lack of engagement. In these circles celebrity advocacy can be remarkably effective. Celebrity works for them in ways which do not work for most of the public. Third, while celebrity advocacy exists to be seen and noticed by as many people as possible, the exposure provides an inscrutable veil over their real influence. In the glare of publicity it is we, the viewers and consumers of the spectacle, who are blinded. Populist celebrity advocacy marks, ironically, disengagement between the public and politics, and particularly the public and civil society.

This book takes an interdisciplinary and examines the nature of authenticity in contemporary capitalist democracies with a focus on interactions between celebrity and democracy as well as concerns over the role of capitalism in fueling a number of contemporary crises. This book gives students and researchers in development studies and media studies a wealth of original empirical data, including interviews across the NGO sector, media and celebrity industries, newspaper analysis, two large surveys of public opinion, and focus group research.