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PARTICIPATION AS STRUCTURAL: PROJECT DOCUMENTS (AN ANNEX)
Get PDFMedia for social change refers to strategic media projects designed to advance causes for the public good. Those projects are rooted in development communication, health communication, environmental communication, social movement theories and other approaches to public communication campaigns. This emphasis is increasingly recognized as interdisciplinary, through the work of research scholars in communications, sociology and other fields, and of professionals in project implementation and evaluation. Although there has been widespread enthusiasm for the integration of participatory approaches within these comprehensive strategies, the diversity of conceptual and operational definitions of participation suggests that consideration of its complexity has not yet been exhausted. To this end, we propose considering participation as a structural consideration within the production of media strategies
PARTICIPATORY COMMUNICATION RESEARCH. History and future of the IAMCR Section
Get PDFJan Servaes, Tom Jacobson and Ullamaija Kivikuru critically review the history of participatory communication research and its theoretical and practical developments both inside and outside the IAMCR, and share their views on future paths and challenges for the Section
SIN COMUNICACIÓN NO HAY DESARROLLO A summary of the regional Latin American report "Without communication, there is no development"
Get PDFRepresentatives of various Latin American organizations engaged in communication and committed to development gathered in Lima from August 24th through 26th, 2006, in preparation for the WCCD. Here we present a summary of the topics shared and reflected upon during that gathering. In a complex world, ruled by inequality and discrimination, communication must be recognized as a specific specialty and a key factor to build development and democracy
A CASE FOR THE QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT OF PARTICIPATORY COMMUNICATION PROGRAMS
Get PDFWhat is dialog, and how can it be measured in a meaningful way? In this article, Jacobson presents an approach to assessing participatory communication based on communication in the form of dialog as conceptualized by Jurgen Habermas
A COMPENDIUM OF REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES IN COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT
Get PDFThe compendium integrates the findings of seven regional initiatives coordinated by FAO in preparation for the World Congress on Communication for Development (WCCD). These initiatives (involving regional meetings, e-forums and research papers) sought to bring together people, ideas and practices from the seven regions to provide a reality check – voices from the field - on actual experience on how Communication for Development (ComDev) is being applied at this point in time.
WHAT DO THEY THINK? POLICY-MAKERS AND THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT. A Perception Study Conducted in 2005-2006
Get PDFThe study “What do they think? Policy-Makers and the Role of Communication for Development” is a follow-up to a similar survey conducted in 1994. The purpose of this 2005-2006 study was to assess whether there have been significant changes in the perception of Communication for Development among decision-makers in multilateral and bilateral aid agencies, in national governments and in major NGOs. In addition, the study strives to identify whether there have been notable changes in the human and material resources committed to this sector
ON PRAGMATISM AND PC
Get PDFWhat do you associate with the initials PC? Personal Computer? Too trivial. Political Correctness? More likely. Post-Colonialism? Most probably not…Colonialism has determined the life experience of the vast majority of the people living in the world today. Yet, in Scandinavia, as in most countries that were not formally part of the European colonial system, the common attitude is that it is none of our business, since we didn’t have any colonies. Interestingly enough, in the Scandinavian case that is not even true. The present Virgin Islands were the Danish West Indies from 1754 to 1917, and constituted a key link in the transatlantic slave trade. Wonderful Copenhagen was to a large extent literally built with earnings from the lucrative business of the ‘black gold’ [1]. And the Scandinavian state authorities’ treatment of the indigenous populations of the Arctic rim are exemplary colonial power relationships. Nevertheless, the modern myth of Scandinavian innocence and excellence keeps on thriving and makes it difficult for postcolonial theories and perspectives to enter into the Nordic public debate. Several parallel recent events do however indicate that a change may be underway. The art project Rethinking Nordic Colonialism. A postcolonial exhibition project in five acts, initiated by the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA), was carried out in 2006 with exhibitions, seminars and other public events in Iceland, Greenland, The Faroe Island and Finnish Sápmi (the fifth act was virtual and consists of the project’s DVD documentation and website www.rethinking-nordiccolonialism. org/). A simultaneous tour of museums and locations was made by the exhibition Traces of Congo, a more conventional attempt at shedding light on the Scandinavian participation in the plundering of the Congo and of Congo’s presence in the Scandinavian imaginary. 2006 also saw the birth of a new Nordic researcher network on the theme The Nordic Colonial Mind, initiated and coordinated by the Nordic Africa Institute based in Uppsala, Sweden. The above-mentioned projects do of course reach a limited and perhaps already enlightened audience. But the TV-series Slavarnes slægt (The Family of the Slaves), made by Danish film producer Alex Frank Larsen and broadcast in several Nordic channels since its premiere screening in DR2 [2] in 2005, has affected and engaged a much wider audience. For this project, initiated ten years ago, Larsen has meticulously searched thorough the Danish historical archives. He has traced between 800 and 900 descendants of black slaves, not only in Denmark but in Sweden and Iceland as well, and he believes there may be thousands. Larsen’s investigative TV journalism, which ought to shake the fundaments of Scandinavians’ self-image, is a prime example of the usefulness of the postcolonial perspective: rewriting history from a different angle and thus giving voice to those whose stories have been silenced or forgotten. By coincidence, this sudden interest in a Nordic colonial past was articulated in a year that the Swedish government had proclaimed as the ‘multicultural year’. Yes, I actually believe it is a mere coincidence, although it may seem likely that a discussion of a hidden colonial legacy ought to have something to do with today’s heated debate, especially in Denmark, on immigration and integration. But such connotations are very rarely made, even in academic discourse. Nor is it common anywhere to apply a postcolonial perspective in communication for development – in spite of ComDev strategies that explicitly aim at ‘empowerment’ and ‘giving voice to the disadvantaged’, etc. The main reason for this miscommunication may be postcolonial theorists’ self-inflicted reputation for being highly academic, difficult and inaccessible. Another reason is that postcolonialism turned into ideology can be dogmatic, even fundamentalist, and/or saturated with political correctness. And there is a prevailing gap between theory and cultural practice. Postcolonial literature was never exclusive or high-brow. But part of the problem is probably also due to reluctance and suspicion among ComDev practitioners. There is a general lack of critical selfreflection in development cooperation, where a postcolonial analysis certainly could contribute a much-needed corrective to the mainstream agenda – even though, or rather especially since, it would potentially challenge its very foundations. The colonial legacy of the development aid industry is difficult to deny. It has been analyzed by Maria Eriksson Baaz in The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid (London: Zed Books, 2005) [An article based on her book is published in this issue of Glocal Times, which focuses on the aftermath of the WCCD held in Rome last October.] A more humble gathering took place in Malmö and Copenhagen in December 2006, as part of the ComDev master course at Malmö University: a seminar on ‘postcolonialism at home’ located at both sides of the Öresund strait[3], in the two stigmatized immigrant-dominated areas of Nørrebro (Copenhagen) and Rosengård (Malmö), with some ten participants on location and about twice as many attending online. The seminar intended to bring together the above-mentioned three discourses: immigration and multiculturalism, postcolonialism and communication for development. Among the speakers in the Nørrebro session was Ellen Nyman, a Swedish- Eritrean actress and activist living and working in Copenhagen. Her artistic and political activism includes posters, flyers, stickers, T-shirts, spam-mail, lectures, (fictitious) newspaper articles and, most of all, live performances in public places, where with her dark complexion she impersonates ‘the other’. One of the front figures of her Spacecampaign is Alem, a veiled woman from Eritrea who challenges the prejudices of the spectators by acting against their expectations. In the mass demonstrations at the European Union summit in Göteborg in 2001, she walked alone in front of a puzzled delegation of Danish Communists with the inscription ‘Whites Only’ in the ring of stars of the blue and yellow EU flag. Later that same year, she achieved massive media attention at the culmination of the famous Danish election campaign that brought the current conservative government with its anti-immigration and apartheid policy to power: She was “the Somali woman” who sang the Danish national anthem outside the parliament building. Students attending the workshop were asked to produce anything that somehow referred to the content and context of the seminar, and at least one of the groups was apparently inspired by Ellen Nyman’s approach. They staged a near-future scenario where the Swedish government made the pioneer decision to give development aid to one of its Nordic neighbours: formerly well-off Denmark, with its dismantled welfare system. Experts from two experienced developing countries, Nicaragua and Ghana, were consulted to decide whether the influx money should be invested in health or education. (Any resemblance with the recently adopted Danish policy to let celebrities advice on the allocation of Danish development support is of course merely coincidental.) Another group of students tried a more serious application in the concretely outlined project News Impulse, aiming at no less than a renewal of news reporting in Malmö and the Öresund region. Their formula consisted in letting inhabitants of the immigrant-dominated and socially deprived (sub-) urban areas become news editors and reporters for one week. During this week, they would work side by side with professionals, who would in turn report on the reactions among people in the communities concerned. The whole project would preferably be analyzed and followed-up by students in ComDev, Culture and Media, Urban Studies, Ethnic Relations and other inter-related subjects at Malmö and other universities in the region. The short duration of the workshop did not allow any local research, neither in Nørrebro nor in Rosengård, and the fact that most of the students participating were attending online, from Colombia to China, turned the venture into a true challenge. But the three online groups, organized according to time zones – Asia, Africa/Europe and America – managed to exchange messages, images and links, and jointly put together different kinds of web documents that were presented at the concluding plenary session. This experimental pilot workshop actually broke new ground in the Malmö ComDev master programme’s ongoing exploration of the unimagined potential of web-based collaborative pedagogy. Another lesson learned might be that postcolonial theories and perspectives do not necessarily have to be high-brow textual analyses. They can be readily applied on all kinds of phenomena in the global everyday. Turning the tables, reversing angles, inverting hierarchies etc. are effective methods and communication tools. In fact, I would consider the mind-opening potential to be their major asset. The Nordic countries – and Sweden in particular – have gained a reputation of being practical and pragmatic, not least in politics. If postcolonial thought has finally rooted itself in these barren territories, the Scandinavian contribution might be precisely that: A more pragmatic approach to global cultural matters. [1] Sweden’s less successful recent colonial affairs are not due to altruistic reasons but mainly historic circumstances. The last war with Russia craved resources that otherwise might have been put into colonialist enterprises. [2] A Danish public service TV ‘culture’ channel. [3] Öresund is the strait that separates the Danish island Sjælland from the south-Swedish province of Skåne.
IN THIS ISSUE: C4D GOES TO ROME (FEBRUARY 2007)
No full textConvened for the first time by three organizations quite different in terms of their background in the field, their structure and agendas -The World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and The Communication Initiative-, the World Congress on Communication for Development (WCCD), held in the FAO headquarters in Rome between October 25 and 27 2006, proved to be a peculiar event. It indeed succeeded in conveying a larger picture of the field’s who’s who - according to statistics presented by Rosa María Alfaro in an article published online [1], the event itself gathered 915 participants from 84 countries- and served to catalyze the publication of several important studies (three of the more relevant are introduced here in ad hoc abridged versions). For those of us who had the opportunity to attend, however, as the WCCD unfolded, contested interests, competing goals and basic underlying questions that remain unanswered became somewhat disturbingly obvious. Some of those questions underpin three of the contributions to this new issue of Glocal Times: Are we communicating development? Communicating as one? What do policy-makers want? But perhaps that’s precisely what is necessary for the field communication for development to make substantial progress: an updated transparent map of differences, disagreements and doubts as from which to keep on working. In my introduction to the prior issue of Glocal Times, drawing on the powerful images of the FAO’s Plenary Room crowded with over-tired but ever-active practitioners, advocates, technicians and academics during the WCCD’s closing ceremony, I wondered: How can we develop and nurture that faculty? How do we make ourselves better able to listen? How do we make ourselves heard? How do we give dialogue every possible chance? I remain critical of several aspects of the WCCD on many different levels, and concerned about some of the developments for the field that have been unfolding in its aftermath (see e.g. Alfonso Gumucio Dagron’s article as regards the current situation at FAO). However, as I wrap up this new issue of Glocal Times, I am glad to convey that it was an eagerness to listen, collaborate, express, respond promptly and share –the best of the WCCD spirit- which characterized the editorial process which I hereby present to the readers. This seventh issue of Glocal Times is grounded in kind original contributions from well-recognized professionals in the field of Communication for Development as well as the steady collaboration of The Communication Initiative, The World Bank’s Development Communications Division and key Communication for Development and Communication officers at FAO. I must thank Deborah Heimann, Chris Morry and Adelaida Trujillo from The Communication Initiative for their key input at an early stage; Lucia Grenna and Paulo Mefalopulos from The World Bank’s Development Communications Division for their good disposition and prompt replies; and Mario Acunzo and Riccardo DelCastello from FAO for bearing with my insistence during awfully busy times. The leading authors of two of the three WCCD-bound studies introduced in this issue –Wendy Quarry and Ricardo Ramirez on the one hand, and Colin Fraser, Sonia Restrepo-Estrada and Leonardo Mazzei on the other kindly took the time to discuss the materials and oversee the abridged versions. I am personally indebted to Colin Fraser and Sonia Restrepo-Estrada in particular, since the e-mail conversation and discussion of ComDev in which they agreed to engage in preparation of this issue was in itself an educational experience. Their article “Policy-makers perceptions’ of Communication for Development: Two surveys twelve years apart”, a companion to the study they co-wrote with Leonardo Mazzei for The World Bank based on their personal reflections, is a must-read. Rosa María Alfaro –and Roxana Jurado, in charge of Communications at Calandria in Perú- readily accepted my invitation to share the collaborative material produced in Latin America in preparation for the WCCD. Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron willingly updated a piece he had originally written for MAZI [2] to incorporate last-minute occurrences. Peter da Costa wrote an original article that connects the WCCD to a fundamental background: the United Nation’s Communication for Development Round Tables. The 10th Inter-Agency Round Table on Communication for Development will take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as this issue of Glocal Times goes online. The Round Tables\u27 historical instrumental role in building a strong communication for development constituency within and beyond the UN system indeed informs the recently held WCCD. Last but not least, Maria Eriksson Baaz revisited the concluding chapter of her book The paternalism of partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid to remind us of the fact that “rather than rejecting development, the task is, as Spivak put it, to ‘engage in a persistent critique of what one cannot not want’”. Glocal Times salutes the advent of the 2006 WCCD and the multiple, concerted efforts that led to it, and hopes to be contributing to the process of discussing “its value, process and possible next steps” (I am quoting Warren Feek’s words in his e-mail to The Communication Initiative’s network soon after Rome) through the contents included in this issue. Of special interest in that sense is “The Rome Consensus”, a 4-pages paper aimed at serving for advocacy purposes that was circulated and discussed during the WCCD and has now been finalized by the three organizers. Signed by “The Participants”, it should serve not as a new beginning –yet another reinvention of the wheel- but rather as a critical reminder of all that remains to be done. As always, your comments, questions and further suggestions are welcome. [1] http://observatorio.ultimosegundo.ig.com.br/artigos.asp?cod=410IPB007 (in Spanish). [2] http://www.communicationforsocialchange.org/mazi-articles.php?id=32
COMMUNICATING AS ONE? A look at the past and future of the UN’s Communication for Development Round Tables
Get PDFCommunication for development has been on the United Nations agenda since the 1960s. As head of UNDP’s Development Support Communications Service (DSCS) from 1967 to 1975, Erskine Childers advocated relentlessly for the UN’s integration of communication as a tool for effective programme delivery. His sixpoint plan called for motivation of the public, education of UN project staff, enhancing inter-governmental coordination in developing countries, providing communication training for communication staff, commissioning and disseminating relevant applied research, and for the UN to pay more attention to project-level communication support
NETWORKING FOR LEARNING: THE PELICAN INITIATIVE
Get PDFThe Pelican Initiative has been up and running since January 2005. An online network, it brings together a growing community of over 370 development practitioners, evaluation specialists, researchers and policy makers from all parts of the world to explore issues, share experiences, ideas and all kinds of information related to learning and communication for development