international comm

Introduction

JAN SERVAES

Development Communication is the study of social change brought about by the application of communication research, theory, and technologies to bring about development.... Development is a widely participatory process of social change in a society, intended to bring about both social and material advancement, including greater equality, freedom, and other valued qualities for the majority of people through their gaining greater control over their environment.

—Everett Rogers, 1976

Communication for development is a social process, designed to seek a common under- standing among all the participants of a development initiative, creating a basis for concerted action.

—UN FAO, 1984

The planned use of communication techniques, activities and media gives people powerful tools both to experience change and actually to guide it. An intensified exchange of ideas among all sectors of society can lead to the greater involvement of people in a common cause. This is a fundamental requirement for appropriate and sustainable development.

—Colin Fraser and Jonathan Villet, 1994

There has been no sustainable, effective social development in which the principles of leadership from within the peoples most affected; a strong and independent voice in public debate, private dialogue and decision making fora by people most affected; and the people most immediately involved defining and agreeing the development agenda, have not been core, central components of the action.

—Warren Feek, Communication Initiative, 2006

Communication for Social Change [CFSC] is a process of public and private dialogue through which people themselves define who they are, what they need and how to get what

they need in order to improve their own lives. It utilizes dialogue that leads to collective problem identification, decision making and community-based implementation of solutions to development issues.

—-CFSC, 2006

Development communication involves creating mechanisms to broaden public access to information on reforms; strengthening clients’ ability to listen to their constituencies and negotiate with stakeholders; empowering grassroots organizations to achieve a more participatory process; and undertaking communication activities that are grounded in research.

—World Bank, 2006 (http://sitresources.worldbank.org 2006)

W hat is communication for development and social change? Scholars and practi-tioners may differ in the wording they use to define the subject, but their intent is constant. Put simply, development programmes cannot produce change without an ongoing, culturally and socially relevant communication dialogue among development providers and clientele, and within the recipient group itself.

Therefore, all those involved in the analysis and application of communication for development and social change—or what can broadly be termed ‘development communication’—would probably agree that in essence development communication is the sharing of knowledge aimed at reaching a consensus for action that takes into account the interests, needs and capacities of all concerned. It is thus a social process. Communication media are important tools in achieving this process but their use is not an aim in itself—interpersonal communication too must play a fundamental role.

This basic consensus on communication for development and social change has been interpreted and applied in different ways throughout the past century. Both at theory and research levels, as well as at the levels of policy and planning-making and implementation, divergent perspectives are on offer.

The relationship between the practical application of communication processes and technologies in achieving positive and measurable development outcomes is an emerging subject of research, discussion and conjecture. While media professionals, opinion-shapers and development assistance policy-makers have often sought to utilize communication systems for social mobilization and change, a lack of understanding of the complexity of behavioural, societal and cultural factors on end-user consumption patterns has more often led to ineffective, or even counterproductive, outcomes.

Experienced practitioners and communication scholars point to the need for a close study of society and culture in formulating media and outreach strategies, thus ensuring that target audiences are reached in an appropriate manner to effect knowledge transfer. This is particularly so in developing countries, where access to information supporting health, agriculture, HIV/AIDS, literacy and other initiatives can be vital.

Introduction 15

In establishing communication for development programmes, professionals have, in the past, often laboured under a misunderstanding commonly held by policy-makers and counterparts relating to the nature of the discipline. Lay persons, understandably, confuse the subject with public relations, public information, corporate communications and other media-related activities. However, while communication for development may incorporate skill-sets from those areas of information dissemination, the subject reaches far deeper and broader into the entire communication process.

At the research and theory levels this could easily be illustrated as follows: In her Ph.D. thesis Jo Ellen Fair (summarized in the journal, Gazette, 1989) examined 224 studies of communication and development published between 1958 and 1986, and found that models predicting either powerful effects or limited effects informed the research.

Development communication in the 1958–1986 period was generally greeted with enthusiasm and optimism:

Communication has been a key element in the West’s project of developing the Third World. In the one-and-a-half decades after Lerner’s influential 1958 study of communication and development in the Middle East, communication researchers assumed that the introduction of media and certain types of educational, political, and economic information into a social system could transform individuals and societies from traditional to modern. Conceived as having fairly direct and powerful effects on Third World audiences, the media were seen as magic multipliers, able to accelerate and magnify the benefits of development. (Fair, 1989:145)

Three directions for future research were suggested: to examine the relevance of message content, to conduct more comparative research and to conduct more policy research.

As a follow-up to this research, Jo Ellen Fair and Hemant Shah (1997) studied 140 journal articles, book chapters and books published in English between 1987 and 1996. Their findings are quite illuminating:

In the 1987–1996 period, Lerner’s modernization model completely disappears. Instead, the most frequently used theoretical framework is participatory development, an optimist postmodern orientation, which is almost the polar opposite of Lerner who viewed mass communication as playing a top-down role in social change. Also vanishing from research in this latter period is the two-step flow model, which was drawn upon by modernization scholars .... Both periods do make use of theories or approaches such as knowledge gap, indirect influence, and uses and gratifications. However, research appearing in the years from 1987–1996 can be characterized as much more theoretically diverse than that published between 1958–1986. (Fair and Shah, 1997:10)

In the 1987–96 study, the most frequent suggestion was ‘the need to conduct more policy research, including institutional analysis of development agency coordination. This was followed

16 Jan Servaes

by the need to research and develop indigenous models of communication and development through participatory research’ (Fair and Shah, 1997:19).

Therefore, today almost nobody would dare to make the optimistic claims of the early years any longer. However, the implicit assumptions on which the so-called dominant modernization paradigm is built do still linger on and continue to influence the policy and planning-making discourse of major actors in the field of communication for development, both at theoretical and applied levels.

From Modernization, over Dependency, to Multiplicity

After the Second World War, the founding of the United Nations stimulated relations among sovereign states, especially the North Atlantic Nations and the developing nations, including the new states emerging out of a colonial past. During the Cold War period, the superpowers— the United States and the former Soviet Union—tried to expand their own interests to the developing countries. In fact, the USA was defining development and social change as the replica of its own political-economic system and opening the way for the transnational corporations. At the same time, the developing countries saw the ‘welfare state’ of the North Atlantic Nations as the ultimate goal of development. These nations were attracted by the new technology transfer and the model of a centralized state with careful economic planning and centrally-directed development bureaucracies for agriculture, education and health as the most effective strategies to catch up with those industrialized countries.

This mainly economic-oriented view, characterized by endogenism and evolutionism, ultimately resulted in the modernization and growth theory. It sees development as a unilinear, evolutionary process and defines the state of underdevelopment in terms of observable quantitative differences between so-called poor and rich countries on the one hand, and traditional and modern societies on the other hand (for more details on these paradigms, see Servaes 1999).

As a result of the general intellectual ‘revolution’ that took place in the mid 1960s, this Euro- or ethno-centric perspective on development was challenged by Latin American social scientists, and a theory dealing with dependency and underdevelopment was born. This dependency approach formed part of a general structuralist re-orientation in the social sciences. The ‘dependistas’ were primarily concerned with the effects of dependency in peripheral countries, but implicit in their analysis was the idea that development and underdevelopment must be understood in the context of the world system.

This dependency paradigm played an important role in the movement for a New World Information and Communication Order from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. At that time, the new states in Africa, Asia and the success of socialist and popular movements in Cuba, China, Chile and other countries provided the goals for political, economic and cultural self- determination within the international community of nations. These new nations shared the ideas of being independent from the superpowers and moved to form the Non-Aligned Nations. The Non-Aligned Movement defined development as political struggle.

Introduction 17

Since the demarcation of the First, Second and Third Worlds has broken down and the cross- over centre-periphery can be found in every region, there is a need for a new concept of devel- opment which emphasizes cultural identity and multidimensionality. The present-day ‘global’ world, in general as well as in its distinct regional and national entities, is confronted with multifaceted crises. Apart from the obvious economic and financial crisis, one could also refer to social, ideological, moral, political, ethnic, ecological and security crises. In other words, the previously-held dependency perspective has become more difficult to support because of the growing interdependency of regions, nations and communities in our so-called ‘global’ world.

From the criticism of the two paradigms above, particularly that of the dependency approach, a new viewpoint on development and social change has come to the forefront. The common starting point here is the examination of the changes from ‘bottom-up’, from the self-development of the local community. The basic assumption is that there are no countries or communities that function completely autonomously and that are completely self-sufficient, nor are there any nations whose development is exclusively determined by external factors. Every society is dependent in one way or another, both in form and in degree. Thus, a framework was sought within which both the Centre and the Periphery could be studied separately and in their mutual relationship.

More attention is also being paid to the content of development, which implies a more normative approach. Another development questions whether ‘developed’ countries are in fact developed and whether this genre of progress is sustainable or desirable. It favours a multiplicity of approaches based on the context and on the basic felt needs, and the empowerment of the most oppressed sectors of various societies at divergent levels. The main thesis is that change must be structural and occur at multiple levels in order to achieve these ends.

Therefore, we start this book with three more general contributions which, each from a multi- dimensional perspective, set the stage for a more detailed analysis of the issue of communication for social change.

Pradip Thomas reminds us that there are about 1.3 billion people worldwide living in absolute poverty, that is to say, people who cannot meet their basic needs. About a third of the population in the so-called developing countries falls in this category, and even in the United States of America and the European Union, 15 per cent of the population is living below nationally- determined poverty levels.

At first sight, the problem of poverty might appear insolvable, but the World Bank has estimated that it would require only 1 per cent of developing countries’ consumption to abolish extreme poverty, which it defines as an income of less than US$ 275 per person per year. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN it would need US$ 13 per person per year to solve the problem of poverty. Furthermore, it would require a transfer of just 3 per cent of the total consumption in developing countries to eliminate poverty in general, defined as an income of less than US$ 370 per person per year. Poverty and its related social disintegration were key themes at the World Summit on Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995, and of the

18 Jan Servaes

World Food Summit held in Rome (at FAO) in 1997. At this World Food Summit the world leaders agreed to set the objective of reducing the number of hungry to around 400 million by the year 2015.

Cuban President Fidel Castro was one of the few dissident voices. He scorned ‘the modesty of this objective as shameful’. He referred to the US$ 700 billion a year spent on arms, even after the end of the Cold War. He finished his statement as follows: ‘The bells that presently toll for those starving to death every day will tomorrow toll for the whole of humanity, which did not want to, know how to, or have the wisdom to save itself from itself.’

Pradip Thomas argues that the worldwide poverty situation could be solved by participatory communication. The use of participatory communication education mechanisms could bring about social change and development through sustained improvements in agriculture, health, education, politics and economics over a sufficiently long enough time to make a considerable proportion of the population less poor, both in material as well as immaterial ways.

Also the recurrent themes of human rights, culture and development have to be addressed in a book like this. Jan Servaes and Chris Verschooten start by revising the often discussed ‘dichotomies’ of tradition versus modernity, universalism versus relativism, and individualism versus collectivism. They arrive at similar conclusions as those advocated by the World Commission on Culture and Development, chaired by the former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar (1995).

Local and Global Perspectives

Processes at local and global levels have further complicated the above developments. The vision of an era of global communications seems especially pertinent when changes in other spheres of human societies are taken into consideration. The 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the explosive growth of the World Wide Web as preludes, have been marked by the collapse of the physical, virtual and institutional barriers, which had kept people apart over the previous several decades. The ever closer trade relationships among nation-states, the growing number of transnational corporations, ICTs, the Internet and discussions on e-commerce and e-governance, the emergence of global health and environmental issues, and a common style of consumption of material and cultural products have all helped to bring about what is described as the ‘globalization’ of our world. In general, globalization is considered as the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life.

But, beyond a general awareness and agreement of this global interconnectedness, there is substantial disagreement as to how globalization is best conceptualized, how one should think about its causal dynamics, how one should characterize its structural, socio-economic consequences, and what implications it has on poverty alleviation, culture and human rights, state power and governance.

Introduction 19

The three different theses on globalization—(hyper)globalist perspective, a sceptical or traditionalist perspective, and a transformationalist perspective—outlined in the chapter by Servaes and Lie can all be found in several other chapters of this book.

Diffusion versus Participatory Communication

The above, more general, typology of the so-called development paradigms can also be found at the communication and cultural levels. The communication media are, in the context of development, generally used to support development initiatives by the dissemination of messages that encourage the public to support development-oriented projects. Although development strategies in developing countries diverge widely, the usual pattern for broadcasting and the press has been predominantly the same: informing the population about projects, illustrating the advantages of these projects, and recommending that they be supported. A typical example of such a strategy is situated in the area of family planning, where communication means like posters, pamphlets, radio, and television attempt to persuade the public to accept birth control methods. Similar strategies are used in campaigns regarding health and nutrition, agricultural projects, education, and so on.

This model sees the communication process mainly as a message going from a sender to a receiver. This hierarchical view on communication can be summarized in Laswell’s classic formula— ‘Who says What through Which channel to Whom with What effect?’—and dates back to (mainly American) research on campaigns and diffusions in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The American scholar Everett Rogers is said to be the person who introduced this diffusion theory in the context of development. Modernization is here conceived as a process of diffusion whereby individuals move from a traditional way of life to a different, more technically developed and more rapidly changing way of life. Building primarily on sociological research in agrarian societies, Rogers stressed the adoption and diffusion processes of cultural innovation. This approach is therefore concerned with the process of diffusion and adoption of innovations in a more systematic and planned way. Mass media is important in spreading awareness of new possibilities and practices, but at the stage where decisions are being made about whether to adopt or not to adopt, personal communication is far more likely to be influential. Therefore, the general conclusion of this line of thought is that mass communication is less likely than personal influence to have a direct effect on social behaviour.

Newer perspectives on development communication claim that this is still a limited view of development communication. They argue that this diffusion model is a vertical or one-way perspective on communication, and that active involvement in the process of the communication itself will accelerate development. Research has shown that, while groups of the public can obtain information from impersonal sources like radio and television, this information has relatively little effect on behavioural changes. And development envisions precisely such change. Similar research has led to the conclusion that more is learned from interpersonal contacts and from mass communication techniques that are based on them. On the lowest level, before people

20 Jan Servaes

can discuss and resolve problems, they must be informed of the facts, information that the media provide nationally as well as regionally and locally. At the same time, the public, if the media are sufficiently accessible, can make its information needs known.

Communication theories such as the ‘diffusion of innovations’, the ‘two-step-flow’, or the ‘extension’ approaches are quite congruent with the modernization theory. The elitist, vertical or top-down orientation of the diffusion model is obvious.

The participatory model, on the other hand, incorporates the concepts in the framework of multiplicity. It stresses the importance of cultural identity of local communities and of democratization and participation at all levels—international, national, local and individual. It points to a strategy, not merely inclusive of, but largely emanating from, the traditional ‘receivers’. Paulo Freire (1983:76) refers to this as the right of all people to individually and collectively speak their word: ‘This is not the privilege of some few men, but the right of every man. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone—nor can he say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words’.

In order to share information, knowledge, trust, commitment and a right attitude in development projects, participation is very important in any decision-making process for development. Therefore, the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems argues that ‘this calls for a new attitude for overcoming stereotyped thinking and to promote more understanding of diversity and plurality, with full respect for the dignity and equality of peoples living in different conditions and acting in different ways’ (MacBride, 1980:254). This model stresses reciprocal collaboration throughout all levels of participation.

Also, these newer approaches argue, the point of departure must be the community. It is at the community level that the problems of living conditions are discussed, and interactions with other communities are elicited. The most developed form of participation is self-management. This principle implies the right to participation in the planning and production of media content. However, not everyone wants to or must be involved in its practical implementation. More important is that participation is made possible in the decision-making regarding the subjects treated in the messages and regarding the selection procedures. One of the fundamental hindrances to the decision to adopt the participation strategy is that it threatens existing hierarchies. Nevertheless, participation does not imply that there is no longer a role for development specialists, planners, and institutional leaders. It only means that the viewpoint of the local groups of the public is considered before the resources for development projects are allocated and distributed, and that suggestions for changes in the policy are taken into consideration.

From Sender to Receiver

Also the perspective on communication has changed. It is more concerned with process and context, that is, on the exchange of ‘meanings,’ and on the importance of this process, namely, the social relational patterns and social institutions that are the result of and are determined by the process. ‘Another’ communication ‘favors multiplicity, smallness of scale, locality,

Introduction 21

deinstitutionalization, interchange of sender-receiver roles (and) horizontality of communication links at all levels of society’ (McQuail, 1983:97). As a result, the focus moves from a ‘communicator’ to a more ‘receiver-centric’ orientation, with the resultant emphasis on meaning sought and ascribed rather than information transmitted.

With this shift in focus, one is no longer attempting to create a need for the information one is disseminating, but one is rather disseminating information for which there is a need. The emphasis is on information exchange rather than on the persuasion in the diffusion model.

To illustrate this shift, Alfonso Gumucio-Dragon presents us with an interesting selection of participatory projects.

The second part of the book further discusses and details the above typologies and findings. Sujatha Sosale adopts a discourse approach to identify two strategies of power on communication and development. One is the power to survey, and the other is the power to remain invisible. She concludes that ‘a critical tension continues to exist between guided social change signified by policy, and alternate possibilities that might fall outside the realm of policy or are at best located at its fringes’.

Roy Colle traces the seven ‘threads’ or origins which have contributed to the complexity of the development communication field. He starts with an appreciation of the pioneering work on development support communication by Erskine Childers and his colleagues in the late 1960s, and continues with the approaches of extension and diffusion, participatory communication, population and health communication, social mobilization, institution-building, and information and communication technologies. Colle concludes that these threads convey a sense of evolving into a development communication fabric. He identifies eight characteristics which together help to define what development communication for the future is about: a focus on beneficiaries, the consideration of various stakeholders, participation, emphasis on outcomes, data gathering and analysis, systematic models, strategy, and a multi-channel versatility.

In similar ways and by way of summary of the most important arguments and findings of the first set of contributions, Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao then present the main perspectives on development communication both at the general development levels, as well as at the more specific communication level.

Robert Huesca zooms in on the concept of participatory communication. He argues that, despite its widespread use, the concept is subject to loose interpretation. Therefore, by tracing the history of participatory communication approaches to development from a Latin American perspective, he aims to present a variety of directions for future research and practice.

Communication for Development and Social Change

At a more applied level, several perspectives on communication for development and social change could be identified, as presented in the third and fourth part of the book.

22 Jan Servaes

A first perspective could be of communication as a process, often seen in metaphor as the fabric of society. It is not confined to the media or to messages, but to their interaction in a network of social relationships. By extension, the reception, evaluation and use of media messages, from whatever source, are as important as their means of production and transmission.

A second perspective is of communications media as a mixed system of mass communication and interpersonal channels, with mutual impact and reinforcement. In other words, the mass media should not be seen in isolation from other conduits.

One could, for instance, examine the role and benefits of radio versus the Internet for devel- opment and democracy. Both the Internet and the radio are characterized by their interactivity. However, if, as many believe, better access to information, education and knowledge would be the best stimulant for development, the Internet’s primary development potential is as a point of access to the global knowledge infrastructure. The danger, now widely recognized, is that access to knowledge increasingly requires a telecom infrastructure that is inaccessible to the poor. Therefore, the digital divide is not about technology, it is about the widening gaps between the developed and developing worlds and the info-rich and the info-poor.

While the benefits offered by the Internet are many, its dependence on a telecom infrastructure means that they are only available to a few. Radio is much more pervasive, accessible and affordable. Blending the two could be an ideal way of ensuring that the benefits accruing from the Internet have wider reach.

Another perspective of communications in the development process is from an inter-sectoral and inter-agency concern. This view is not confined to information or broadcasting organizations and ministries, but extends to all sectors, and its success in influencing and sustaining development depends to a large extent on the adequacy of mechanisms for integration and co-ordination.

Therefore, different agencies have evolved distinct approaches and strategies for putting the principles into operation with differentiated policy bases, planning models and terminologies. As a result, it is often difficult for specialists within particular agencies to understand precisely what others are trying to express or to achieve, as presented in the chapter on governmental and non-governmental agencies by Jan Servaes.

FAO’s Communication for Development Group has arguably been one of the foremost practitioners of applied communication for improving agriculture and related sectors in the developing world (for example, forestry, environment and nutrition), since its establishment in 1969. During these three decades the role of communication has undertaken a dramatic shift from a one-way, top-down transfer of messages by agricultural technicians to farmers, to a social process designed to bring together both groups in a two-way sharing of information among communication equals—in short, participatory communication. In recognizing that rural people are at the heart of development, by seeking their views and involving them from the start, participatory communication has become what many consider to be the key link between farmers, extension, and research for planning and implementing consensus-based development initiatives. Too often, however, it has been a missing link and many projects have failed as a result.

Introduction 23

Along with communication, it is also now widely accepted that a parallel investment in human resources through education and training of adults is essential for project success. Awareness raising, knowledge acquisition, attitude change, confidence building, participation in decision- making and action, all require processes of education and communication. And all are essential for effective development—they are not just desirable options.

In this spirit, the chapter by Gary Coldevin and others traces the growth of participatory communication and adult learning in FAO’s field programmes, along with examples drawn from other agencies, and provides snapshots of notable successes. With a view on the current push towards networking the developing world, a concluding section draws on the lessons emerging from the application of traditional and older electronic media format, as guidelines for constructive use of the Internet in rural settings.

Neill McKee, Erma Manoncourt, Chin Saik Yook and Rachel Carnegie summarize the UNICEF experience. They start from very basic questions such as ‘Why are people’s behaviours so difficult to change?’, and ‘Why do development communication interventions often fall short of their behaviour altering goals?’. Basing themselves on an integrated approach towards involving people in evolving behaviour, and an analysis of several cases, they conclude that many pro- cesses and factors must converge in order to facilitate behaviour change. They also emphasize the importance of building effective and responsive communication elements into development programmes right from the start of all projects: ‘While communication on its own will not bring about change and development, neither will change happen without development communi- cation. We need to integrate all our efforts’.

HIV/AIDS Communication

Many practitioners believe that they can achieve the greatest understanding by combining more than one theory or developing their own conceptual framework. Where previous perspectives did not succeed in reconciling economic growth with social justice, an attempt should be made to approach problems of freedom and justice from the relationship of tension between the individual and the society, and limits of growth and sustainability are seen as inherent to the interaction between society and its physical and cultural ecology.

The so-called Copenhagen Consensus Project is worth mentioning in this context. Though still dominated by economic perspectives and researchers (some of them Nobel prize winners), the panel of experts evaluated a large number of development recommendations, drawn from assessments by UN agencies, and identified 10 core challenges for the future:

• Civil conflicts • Climate change • Communicable diseases • Education

24 Jan Servaes

• Financial stability • Governance • Hunger and malnutrition • Migration • Trade reform • Water and sanitation

The major challenge identified by this panel was the fight against HIV/AIDS. (For more details, see a number of reports in The Economist, April–June 2004, or visit www.copenhagenconsensus. com).

As HIV/AIDS is increasingly becoming identified as one of the major challenges for commu- nication for development and social change advocates and practitioners, the fourth part of the book presents three chapters which together summarize the core issues from both theoretical and applied perspectives. Rico Lie reviews three shifts in thinking about appropriate HIV/AIDS communication: (1) a shift away from mainstream HIV/AIDS mass media campaigning towards culturally appropriate responses to HIV/AIDS and the use of local community media; (2) a shift away from seeing HIV/AIDS primarily as a health problem towards seeing it as a development problem, and (3) a shift from a primary focus on behavioural change to a primary focus on social change. These shifts overlap and are connected. As a consequence of these shifts in the underlying philosophical principles and paradigmatic thinking about communication, a shift in research and intervention strategies is also suggested. This shift concerns an evolutionary moving on from the use of dominant (theoretical) models to loose conceptual frameworks and common principles.

Patchanee Malikhao illustrates these shifts in the case of Thailand. After a brief historical overview of the situation of HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in Thailand, she describes the communication strategies that Buddhist and Christian leaders employ to operate HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in two separate villages in the northern part of Thailand (Chiang Rai province) where the numbers of people who died of AIDS are the highest in the country. Also, Thomas Tufte addresses the changes in communication perspectives and strategies. He analyses the case of Soul City in order to discuss how an entertainment-education based communication strategy can contribute to a participatory development process. Soul City is the name of the media and health NGO behind the large, ongoing, goal-oriented, media-driven information and training initiative that works for social change in the South African society. First, he introduces the history and development of Soul City. Second, he provides a brief historical overview of the developments within entertainment-education in relation to the general discussions of communication for development. Finally Tufte explores how Soul City contributes to the further development of entertainment-education strategies in both theory and practice. As so often seen before, practice comes prior to theory, and he thus argues that what Soul City is de facto doing is anticipating the theoretical advancement he wishes to argue for entertainment- education (EE).

Introduction 25

Furthermore, according to Ronny Adhikarya (in The Journal of Development Communication, 1997:22), there appears to be at least two main problems which limit development communicators’ effectiveness in contributing successfully to achieving development objectives or goals:

The first problem is related to the main tasks normally assigned to communication specialists. Most of them are expected to produce mainly publicity, public relations, and/or multi-media materials without much involvement at the information needs assessment, communication strategy and planning, message positioning, treatment, and design, and/or multi-media mix selection processes. The second, and more critical, problem is their lack of a holistic, integrated, multi-disciplinary and inter-sectoral approach in analysing communication problems as well as in designing and planning communication strategies in support of the broader development objectives or goals.

As academic and professional training programmes in development communication emerge (they are already established in the Asia region, and are growing elsewhere), these frequently emphasize one set of approaches and vocabularies, without looking comparatively at alternatives. This inhibits cross-fertilization, comparative analysis, and mutual learning, but the most significant obstacle that it creates is to collaborative, inter-agency working, at a time when integrated approaches to development are emphasized, and coordination is important for reasons of economy, efficiency, and maximization of impact.

Special Cases

Two additional cases which need attention are the role and place of the often-overlooked community media, and the role of the mass media in ethno-political conflicts.

In the first case Carpentier, Lie and Servaes argue that the multiplicity of media-labelled ‘community media’ necessitates different approaches towards a definition of community media.

They start from the ‘working definition’ of community radio adopted by AMARC, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters. This organization encompasses a wide range of radio practices in the different continents. In Latin America, the AMARC-members are termed popular radio, educational radio, miners’ radio or peasants’ radio. In Africa, they refer to local rural radio. In Europe, it is often called associative radio, free radio, neighbourhood radio or community radio. In Asia, they speak of radio for development, and of community radio; in Oceania of aboriginal radio, public radio, and of community radio. In AMARC’s attempts to avoid a prescriptive definition, a community radio station is labelled ‘a “non-profit” station, currently broadcasting, which offers a service to the community in which it is located, or to which it broadcasts, while promoting the participation of this community in the radio’ (AMARC, 1994:4).

Finally, Georgios Terzis and Myria Vassiliadou argue that, as a result of their ability to reach and participate in the opinion-building process for large numbers of people, the media carry immense power in shaping the course of an ethno-political conflict. Although many past and

26 Jan Servaes

present examples of the media’s negative contribution to the escalation of violent conflicts exist, fair and accurate journalism and media programming that build confidence and counteract misperceptions have a significant positive role to play in both conflict prevention and transformation. They attempt to investigate the potentials of the media in situations of ethno-political conflict, and concentrate on three different forms of projects: training, provision of media hardware, and production of peace-oriented media programming.

Communication and Development for Whom and for What?

Colin Fraser and Sonia Restrepo-Estrada (1998) sum it all up: the successes and failures of most development projects are often determined by two crucial factors, that is, communication and people’s involvement. ‘Even though communication for development came into being in the 1960s, and has clearly shown its usefulness and impact in change and development actions, its role is still not understood and appreciated to the point that it is routinely included in development planning’ (Fraser and Restrepo-Estrada, 1998:39). Many well-intended projects are thought out in places far remote from the actual context in which they are supposed to be implemented. Consequently, they fail to understand the complex power relationships and the cultural and communication processes existing at these local levels.

Therefore, most authors in this collection argue that authentic participation directly addresses power and its distribution in society. Participation involves the more equitable sharing of both political and economic power, which often decreases the advantage of certain groups. Structural change involves the redistribution of power. In mass communication areas, many communication experts agree that structural change should occur first in order to establish participatory communication policies.

Hopefully this collection offers interesting insights and examples to prove that the field of communication for development and social change is still alive and kicking.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this book, entitled Approaches to Development: Studies on Communication for Development was published in March 2003 by UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector under the guidance of the late Lluis Artigas de Quadras. This edition, which was also distributed on a CD-ROM, was highly successful and soon out of print. We are grateful to UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, Dr Abdul Waheed Khan, for allowing us to transfer the copyright to SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd. All of the chapters in this new version have been updated, most of them have gone through major rewriting and editing. Some new texts have been added to this volume. We thank the SAGE team, Sugata Ghosh, Vaijayantee Bhattacharya and Girish Kumar Sharma, for their support and perseverance in getting this new version out.

Introduction 27

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