Chapter 5. Conclusion and Appendices

Conclusion

Contemporary public diplomacy is neither a static practice nor an exhaustive set of principles.  The complexity of the international information environment, the difficult policy options that face policymakers and practitioners, and the myriad ways to align ends, ways, and means to achieve results mean that the theory and practice of contemporary public diplomacy is both exciting and challenging.  Public diplomacy draws on concepts from traditional international relations and diplomacy, global public health, corporate marketing, and influence operations.  As described in these chapters, public diplomacy involves more than just the Department of State or its staff of explicitly designated PD practitioners. Interpreted in the broadest sense, public diplomacy is a function of states and people in an international system.  It is a systemic dialog between governments, peoples, their aspirations, and the organizations they create to achieve them.

The U.S. government employs public diplomacy to advance its foreign policy goals in concert with the various functions at its disposal, including diplomacy, information, military, and economic (as in the DIME framework).  It incorporates public diplomacy into its functions through laws, institutions, processes, and the allocation of resources.  In its policy dimensions, public diplomacy operates as a facet of the broader set of concentric policy documents that guide U.S. foreign policy from the National Security Strategy down to the Integrated Country Strategy.  Borrowing from typical military concepts, it consists of both strategic and tactical components that support one another and together explain how policy elicits change through public diplomacy.  The Department, in its assessment of contemporary public diplomacy, developed the PD Framework model to define this process as incorporating the application of policy in context, audience analysis, plan development, effective management, and informed adaptation.

Although the approach to public diplomacy has changed over the decades, its primary function remains to influence the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of foreign publics.  This volume of PD Foundations describes how the U.S. government currently approaches this and, to some extent, prescribes how to do so more effectively.  By providing a comprehensive shared vision of the full scope and scale of public diplomacy through many lenses, this document is the foundation for ongoing analysis of its purpose and practice.

The attempt to define public diplomacy for the U.S. government in this publication is itself a part of the evolution of public diplomacy, as both a product of and contribution to the ongoing adaptation of policy making to a rapidly changing global environment.  Like public diplomacy itself, this document will evolve to both reflect and guide the development of PD for the U.S. government as it pursues more rigorous effectiveness in its implementation of foreign policy.  Public diplomacy may never be as structured or as rigid as a science – and perhaps, as a deeply human endeavor, never should be.  And yet it cannot be effective at the necessary scale if it is as unconstrained as art.  It is a craft, straddling the line between science and art subject to the fundamental dynamics shaping the social context in which it operates. 

The complexity of contemporary public diplomacy is both a strength and a weakness, an opportunity and a challenge.  Navigating the waters of this future-oriented, human-focused enterprise requires the creativity, ambition, and perseverance of more than just its direct practitioners.  The path forward depends on the participation of the numerous researchers, historians, scientists, policy makers, innovators, analysts, and practitioners on whose work this volume is based and further invites the diversity and ambiguity of civilization along for the ride.