Pathways of connection: An analytical approach to the impacts of public diplomacy

•The ultimate objective of public diplomacy is advancing national interests.•Public diplomacy projects should be assessed as foreign policy tools.•Public diplomacy might create an impact on three different areas.•Public diplomacy and foreign policy can be linked through six pathways of connections.

Public diplomacy, albeit its functional similarities with public relations and other corporate communication tools, is inherently a foreign policy tool, used by practitioner states to advance their national interests and achieve their foreign policy goals. The purpose of this theoretical article is to provide a framework to analyze the impacts of public diplomacy projects by acknowledging both its communication aspect and political nature. The pathways of connection framework is built in two-steps. First, the public diplomacy concept is situated in international politics by evaluating the concept through mainstream international relations theories. This evaluation yields three areas on which public diplomacy projects might have an impact. Second, the existing academic and practical measurement models are categorized under these areas and two pathways per area are presented. The theoretical framework can be used to understand different outcomes of public diplomacy projects and to provide a more accurate measurement of their success.