Trickle-Up in Politics

For a domain such as development cooperation, public support and awareness raising become particularly relevant in view of converting ideas and opinions current in society into political support, and eventually into a congruent policy. In this chapter, we first describe what is meant by the term political support. This is followed by an account of our research on the issue in the Belgian political world. A key question here is to which extent political parties are concerned about development cooperation. At the end of this chapter, we briefly sum up the policy implications of the way politics are capturing public support for foreign aid.