The global development landscape today looks very different from what forecasters predicted five years ago. The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 led to the worst global recession in 90 years, and the brunt of the financial fallout was borne by the already fragile economies of low-income countries, leading to a widespread debt crisis.
As a result, the world is far off track from meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a suite of benchmarks that leaders in UN member states committed to achieving by 2030. By some measures, development progress has not just stalled but is even going backward, with the UN warning of a ”lost decade for development.”
Amidst these profound changes, it’s more important than ever to hear from not only citizens in Global South countries, but also the leaders and policymakers who are responsible for local development policies and must respond to disparate crises that interact in unexpected ways. Yet, while many global surveys of public attitudes exist, like the Gallup World Poll and Pew’s Global Attitudes Survey, few such surveys target leaders specifically.
AidData has worked to meet this need. Conducted every three to four years, our flagship Listening to Leaders (LTL) Survey is the only one of its kind to canvass these leaders on a global scale. Earlier this summer, we launched the fourth wave of the survey, inviting over 70,000 public, private, and civil society leaders in 148 countries to participate. The survey has now concluded, and later this year, AidData will publicly release the aggregated survey response data and an accompanying analytical report.
This latest wave of the LTL Survey comes as AidData’s Listening to Leaders program celebrates its 10th anniversary. To date, the LTL program has resulted in hundreds of citations in academic and policy articles, with uptake by or partnerships with major development partner institutions—including the African Development Bank (AfDB), the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Gates Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the IMF, the OECD, the UNDP, the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), and the World Bank Group.
“The Listening to Leaders Survey is unique in collecting 360-degree feedback from a broader cross-section of leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector who truly make and shape development policy in the Global South,” said Samantha Custer, AidData’s Director of Policy Analysis and head of the Listening to Leaders research program. This year’s edition revisited key questions asked of leaders in previous rounds: What problems do leaders most want to solve, what are the barriers to reform, and how do they rate the performance of their foreign aid partners? The resulting analysis will provide comparative views across stakeholder groups, sectors, and geographic regions.
But the team behind the survey also included fresh inquiries on pressing issues. “We’re peering around the corner to tackle new and emerging questions,” said Custer. “What do leaders think about gender, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) safeguards in their local and national development strategies? In what ways does the architecture of international development cooperation need to evolve to stay relevant?”
The 2024 LTL Survey will be a valuable source of feedback for the world’s major donors, from international organizations like the United Nations and World Bank to leading bilaterals like China and the U.S., in a rapidly changing development landscape. This is the first global survey that AidData has fielded since the seismic shifts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What’s new in 2024:
- Ahead of 2030, we asked leaders about the visibility and relevance of the SDGs for their national development strategies to inform the architecture of what a successor global development agenda might look like.
- We partnered with the UK’s Development Engagement Lab to field new questions about the intersection between gender and international development. We asked leaders about government and development partner spending in their countries related to gender, and what they think would be most important to improve the lives of women and girls in particular.
- We’re working with researchers at the University of Glasgow to investigate how lending terms impact leaders’ perceptions of development investments. How does earmarking or conditionality affect how attractive leaders find a development project to be?
- In cooperation with the Inter-American Development Bank, we added six new countries, including some that recently made the transition to high-income status, who were surveyed for the first time: the Bahamas, Bermuda, Chile, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad & Tobago.
- To understand how leaders make trade-offs in choosing to work with different development partners, we included new experimental questions in partnership with the Ford Foundation to gauge attitudes towards the inclusion of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) safeguards as requirements to access project financing.
“I’m especially looking forward to learning about leaders’ views on gender-inclusive development policies, including how much leaders think international actors should do versus how much their own governments should do to promote gender equality in their countries,” said Kelsey Marshall, a Program Manager at AidData and an architect of the survey. “These kinds of questions are often fielded in surveys of citizens, but leaders will now have a chance to weigh in.”
Over the past 10 years, AidData has published a dozen reports that draw from Listening to Leaders surveys. For each previous survey wave, we’ve also released aggregated datasets as a publicly available resource (available for the 2014, 2017, and 2020 surveys). Leaders who take the survey are among the first to receive the results.
“More than 17,000 leaders have shared their views with us over the past decade, for which we’re incredibly grateful,” said Custer. “This work was also made possible by over a dozen AidData staff, hundreds of student researchers at William & Mary, innumerable peer reviewers, and funding partners across the globe.” Since the last wave of the survey, over 46 AidData student research assistants have worked meticulously to update the sampling frame of over 100,000 leaders.
In addition to the global survey, AidData’s LTL program has fielded numerous snap polls and custom survey analyses over the past decade. In May, AidData and REPOA, a leading Tanzanian policy research organization, published a report in Kiswahili and English, Investing in Tanzania’s People/Kuwekeza kwa Watu wa Tanzania, that draws from an AidData snap poll of 150 Tanzanian leaders to understand the U.S. impact on Tanzania’s economy and development. In March, another AidData report, BRI From the Ground Up, analyzed the first survey that systematically captured perceptions of China’s BRI among leaders who make and shape development policy in 129 countries in the Global South. And last year, AidData was invited to contribute a chapter to the OECD's annual Development Co-operation Report, drawing on our LTL data to provide suggestions for how OECD donor countries can best deploy resources, broker partnerships, and contribute expertise to help Global South leaders deliver development progress for their countries.
Later this year, AidData will release its first analytical report synthesizing insights on how the global development landscape has evolved over the last decade, incorporating analysis of the new 2024 data along with the three prior waves. Our research team is also working with several development partners to produce custom analysis with more granular insights to inform their strategies and services to be more responsive to their counterparts in the Global South. An FAQ page is available with more information for respondents about the 2024 survey.
For media and partnership inquiries, please contact Alex Wooley, Director of Partnerships and Communications, at awooley@aiddata.org or +1 757-585-9875.
