Public diplomacy is at its best when it opens doors. Introductions are made, conversations begin and relationships take shape that formal channels could not create alone. Now picture the natural next step: the field showing, with confidence, what those doors led to.
That step is within reach. Applause tells us a programme was welcomed. Trade records can tell us what grew from it. Together they make a complete story, and the field is well placed to tell it.
Public diplomacy has an old and well earned record of usefulness. It listens, explains, connects and builds a familiarity that formal channels cannot create alone. The next chapter is about showing what the work achieves and sharing that with the people who support it.
Trade offers an unusually clear way to do this. Customs records, bilateral flows and firm level results already exist in public statistics, independent of any single programme. Because the programme did not produce them, they give its results added credibility.
I call the distance between what the field believes and what it has demonstrated the evidence gap, and I see it as an opportunity. The records needed to close it are already available. This article presents no new trade figures. It shows that the field’s own definitions point toward outcome evidence, that the scholarship calls for closer collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and that a shared standard of validity would let practitioners build that evidence together.
A Definition That Points at Outcomes
Joseph Nye defines soft power as the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants, and he traces it to culture, values and policies. Read plainly, the definition is built on results. It says what the work should produce. It does not say which activities should occur.
A field that defines its power by outcomes has accepted that outcomes are the proper basis for judging it. Attendance, reach and goodwill are useful records of effort, but they are not what the definition names.
Nye adds that smart public diplomacy depends on credibility, self criticism and civil society. Self criticism has a practical form that is easy to overlook. It means reporting, in the same document and with the same prominence, the results that fell short of what was intended. An institution that does so gives its audiences a reason to believe the results it reports as successes.
Commercial outcomes are only one thing public diplomacy may seek, and I do not suggest otherwise. They are, however, unusually checkable. A claim about understanding or trust must usually be tested with surveys or interviews that the programme itself designs. A claim about trade can be tested against records that exist independently of the programme. That difference is the reason this article begins with commerce.
What the Scholarship Admits About Method
Eytan Gilboa surveyed attempts to theorise public diplomacy across international relations, strategic studies, diplomatic studies, public relations and communication. He also examined the research methods used in the field, including models, paradigms, case studies and comparative analysis. His work identifies promising directions as well as weaknesses and gaps in existing knowledge and methodology. His conclusion is that only a systematic multidisciplinary effort and close collaboration between researchers and practitioners can lead to a coherent theory of public diplomacy.
Two points follow. The first is that the gap is not a failing of practitioners alone. A discipline that is still developing its methods will naturally produce programmes that are better at acting than at measuring. Said plainly, the gap is shared, and so is the opportunity.
The second is that the remedy named is collaboration. Practitioners hold the cases: the briefings, the introductions, the follow up calls and the orders that did or did not come. Researchers hold method: comparison, controls and the habit of testing rival explanations.
I would add one reading of my own. Among all the outcomes public diplomacy can claim, commercial ones may be the best place to begin that collaboration, because the outcome data already exist outside the programme. That is a judgment rather than a finding, and readers should weigh it accordingly.
Why Praise Is Easy to Mistake for Proof
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argued in 1998 that in an age of abundant information, credibility becomes an increasingly important source of power. Audiences need some way to decide whom to believe, and credibility supplies it.
A claim of success is itself a communication, and it faces the same test. A result reported by the programme that produced it carries less weight than a result that can be checked against records the programme did not create.
There is also a human reason why praise is mistaken for proof. Robert Jervis showed that decision makers tend to fit incoming information into images they already hold, producing patterned rather than random errors in judging the intentions of others. The article concerns international misperception, and applying it to programme evaluation is my own extension. The extension seems fair. A team convinced that its programme works will tend to read a strong quarter as confirmation and a weak quarter as noise.
Practitioners will recognise the pattern from ordinary working life. A delegation visits a promising market. Trade there is strong the following year. The two events sit side by side, and the mind joins them. A stricter question asks whether trade was already strong, and whether it would have grown anyway.
The safeguard is simple to state. Decide, before the results arrive, what would count as evidence for the programme and what would count as evidence against it. A standard fixed in advance cannot be bent to fit whatever happens.
Outputs, Outcomes and the Funder’s Question
The most common gap in public diplomacy reporting is also the simplest to close. Activity is presented as achievement.
A practical line separates the two, and the line is control. A practitioner controls what is delivered: the event, the briefing, the introduction. The practitioner does not control what the audience does afterwards. Forty importers attending a briefing is an output. A repeat order from one of them six months later is an outcome. Both matter. Only one answers the question a funder is entitled to ask.
A simple working map shows how far each common record can carry a claim.
| Common record | What it shows | What would show more |
| Attendance at an event | Reach and efficiency | Follow up contact within a set period |
| Meetings arranged | Access created | Samples or quotations that followed |
| Favourable survey result | General attitudes | Product level trade flows over time |
| Repeat orders from participants | An outcome | Comparison with similar buyers who did not attend |
A meeting arranged is evidence of access. It is not evidence of a sale, and a report that treats it as one invites the first sceptical question.
Building a Shared Standard of Validity
Peter Haas described epistemic communities as networks of professionals with recognised expertise and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge. Their members share normative beliefs, causal beliefs, notions of validity and a common policy enterprise.
The third of those is the one that matters here. Notions of validity are shared agreements about what counts as a good reason to believe something. Public diplomacy draws practitioners from diplomacy, communication, trade promotion and research, and each tradition carries its own sense of what counts as proof. Without a shared standard, each programme’s claims remain internal to the programme that made them.
A shared standard need not be elaborate. It could begin with four agreements. What counts as an outcome and what counts as an output. What baseline must be recorded before an activity begins. What kind of comparison is acceptable. What must be disclosed alongside any claimed result, including results that fell short.
Where could such agreements start? Professional networks, training courses and working groups are the usual places where expectations become ordinary through exposure. Gilboa’s call for collaboration between researchers and practitioners points to the same setting. The agreements will be strongest if they are adopted first by institutions whose reports others already read with respect.
A Working Evidence Standard
None of this requires a large research budget. It requires habits. Five of them would raise the quality of evidence within a single reporting cycle.
1. Name the outcome before the activity. Write down what should be different, for whom, and by when, before choosing the event, the visit or the publication. If the intended result cannot be stated in one sentence, the activity is not ready.
2. Label outputs as outputs. Report counts of activity in one section and evidence of effect in another, and never allow the first to stand in for the second.
3. Record a baseline and a comparison. Note the starting position, such as existing trade levels, existing contacts or existing awareness. Where possible, track a comparable group that did not take part. A baseline makes change visible. A comparison makes change creditable.
4. Write the pathway and its rivals. For every claimed result, state the steps by which the activity might have produced it, and the other explanations that fit the facts: the parties already knew each other, a price changed, a rule changed. A claim made this way is more modest than a claim of credit, and far more likely to survive scrutiny.
5. Use independent records and report the whole picture. Check commercial claims against trade statistics the programme did not produce, and publish what fell short alongside what succeeded. An evaluation that finds room to improve is some of the most valuable information an institution can buy.
A Worked Illustration
Consider a hypothetical programme, invented here for illustration only. A trade section hosts a briefing for twenty buyers in one product category. Before the event, it records how many of those buyers already import from the market being promoted. It writes the intended outcome in one sentence: at least four buyers will request samples within three months.
After the event, it records who requested samples, who asked for quotations and who placed an order. It notes the rival explanations it can see, such as buyers already in talks or a seasonal demand peak. It then compares product level import data for the category with a similar category it did not promote. The resulting report is smaller than a headline, and it survives the first sceptical question.
What We Still Do Not Know
An honest analysis states its limits plainly.
First, the scholarship used here predates the present period. It runs from 1968 to 2008. Applying it to current practice is an exercise in judgment and not an empirical finding, and readers should weigh it accordingly.
Second, this article offers no trade figures and makes no claim about how much public diplomacy changes trade. That is an empirical question. The argument here is only that the question is testable and that the field is well placed to test it.
Third, commercial outcomes are one objective among many. Understanding, access and trust are legitimate aims, and they deserve evidence of their own, built to the same standard.
Fourth, what counts as a comparable group is open to debate, and smaller programmes may lack the numbers to use one. They can still record a baseline and a pathway, and begin there.
None of these limits weakens the case for starting. They shape how to start: small, specific and open to revision.
Conclusion: Evidence Is the Better Advocate
Public diplomacy earns its place when it narrows the distance between parties who need each other and have not yet met. The field’s own definitions point to outcomes, its scholarship names the method gap candidly, and its practitioners are well placed to close it. What remains is a shared standard and the habit of applying it.
A field confident in its value should welcome the audit. An audited claim is one that others can finally repeat.
The data to test public diplomacy already exist, and the field that reads them first will decide what the rest of diplomacy is asked to prove next.
