Making Waves: Introduction
Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change
Introduction
Since April 1997 the Rockefeller Foundation, through its Communications Office in New York under the leadership of Denise Gray-Felder, has been promoting a series of meetings among communications specialists to reflect on communication for social change at the hinge of the millennium.
These meetings in Bellagio, Italy, Cape Town, South Africa, and New York, New York, have helped to define the questions, rather than the models. They contributed to the creation of a position paper that has been widely distributed in print and through various Websites, in English, Spanish and French.
Some issues discussed during the meetings and also through e-mail exchanges between meetings lead the group to realise that much of the ideal communication processes that involve people could be found in a number of grassroots experiences in a variety of forms in many developing countries. The need for more research that would bring to light relevant information on experiences of participatory communication for social change was clear. That is how this exercise came to life.
CASE STORIES: A HIDDEN PICTURE
This report gathers a collection of fifty case stories, brief descriptions of experiences of communication for social change that were selected for their participatory approaches. Some of them were visited physically; for the others information was obtained through e-mail, fax and the Internet.
Despite the fact that Latin America is ahead in the number of communication experiences and that radio has been the most important medium for development and social change worldwide, the initial criteria of selection were set to achieve a balanced representation between the regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as among the media and the tools relevant to the experiences: radio, video, theatre, the Internet and others. It also aimed to select experiences with a strong component of community ownership.
During the research period it proved very difficult to stick to the principle of selecting only those experiences where community ownership was present. There were other angles to consider. For example, some experiences had community ownership as a final objective even if at the time of the research the degree of the community's involvement in the development was still at an early stage.
Other cases proved to be important in terms of social change and participation without including community ownership of media.
The result is a collection of case stories that is important precisely because of its variety and cultural relevance to the people of each community. These examples show that the beauty of participatory communication is that it can adopt different forms according to need, and that no blueprint model can impose itself over the richness of views and cultural interactions. Which is to say that none of these experiences is perfect nor has achieved full success. The dynamics of social struggle and social development is a process, and the accompanying communication components are also part of the process and subject to the same positive and negative influences. Some of these experiences no longer exist, but they were important for the community when they were still active. Some are in too early stages to draw conclusions about their future. Needless to say, all of them have faced constraints since their individual inceptions and have often failed to reach solutions, but they are still interesting examples to analyse.
Although acknowledging the importance that strategies of social marketing and information dissemination have had since the 1960s, an effort was made to select experiences that moved the concept of communication for social change one step forward.
The initial criteria had to be more flexible when recognising the importance of networking projects for communication, projects that are not defined as grassroots, but nevertheless contribute to sustain grassroots efforts.
One of the main objectives was to look at experiences that were well-established at the community level, not just one-time projects with a lifespan limited by donor's inputs. The community itself had to be in charge of the communication initiative, even if the community had not originated it. The initiative should be rooted into the community's daily life. For that matter, we looked at experiences that had at least one year of development since establishment.
Ideally, the project should have been appropriated by the community. The foremost example in this selection describes a community that runs the communication initiative in all aspects: financing, administration, training, technical, etc. Some other initiatives included in the report aim at this objective but are still in the process of consolidating.
Another important criterion was to consider initiatives that contributed to the strengthening of democratic values, culture and peace, thus reinforcing the community based organisations (CBOs) and allowing the majority to have a voice. Cultural identity should be central to the communication experience. The community should have assimilated any new tools of information technology without jeopardising local values or language.
The research was set to look at experiences of initiatives that are innovative in the manner in which they build alliances with local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), development organisations and other institutions. Also, those experiences aim to contribute to horizontal networking and knowledge sharing.
We didn't concentrate necessarily on the most successful initiatives but also on those that, in spite of their failures, provide important lessons. Similarly, it was important to review a few initiatives that may have already left behind their most successful moments; nevertheless they had 1 or 20 years of development and often provide more valuable information than recently established successful experiences that are still protected by funding and technical assistance.
The issue of a balanced representation was key to the preparation of the report and to the final selection of case stories. All regions in the Third World are represented fairly equally in spite of the fact that Latin America has traditionally been involved in participatory communication, while Africa and Asia lag behind.
Likewise, except for print media, which is seldom employed because of illiteracy levels, almost all other media are represented here: video, radio, interpersonal, the Internet and theatre. Radio is, however, the most often utilised and successful medium for social change.
An additional effort was made to include a balanced representation of experiences initiated by different stakeholders, such as: the community, NGOs, government, international cooperation agencies, regional networks, and religious organisations.
In Europe and the United States, the recent literature on communication for development often refers only to books and documents published in English. Thus, studies on the theory of communication development will often include in their bibliography references to the same old paradigms: Lerner, Rogers, Schramm. and some of the new ones: Jacobson, Servaes, White, Korten, Ascroft, Schiller or Habermas, among others. There wouldn't be references to Mattelart, Freire, Agrawal, Nair, Hamelink, Flugesang or Castells if their essays were not translated to English or written in English. And definitely, the very important contributions of Diaz Bordenave, Martin Barbero, Prieto Castillo, Reyes Matta, Beltrán and others from Latin America, wouldn't be recognised at all if a handful of their articles hadn't been lucky enough to break the language barrier. However, the most substantial part of their work remains unknown by academics in the United States and Europe.
If it's true that the discussion on participatory communication has become popular since the 1980s, it is no less true that most of the existing experiences are still ignored. Much of the available literature is based on a handful of case stories, mostly drawn from countries where English is the enabling research tool. This is one of the reasons why the participatory communication experiences in Latin America which started in the late 1940s and now count in the thousands are taken into account far less by academics in Europe or North America.
While a much greater understanding of the role of communicationin social change is now spread among development organisations, particularly in developing countries and among academics in industrialised countries, still, little is known about many concrete experiencesand projects where communication has been or is instrumental in social change.
Because of the language barriers and the scarce international visibility of most of the grassroots experiences, there is much misunderstanding among development organisations, and even academic institutions, about the essence of participatory communication practices that are alive and well in developing nations. In spite of the increasing awareness about the relevance of participation in economic and social development, the concept of participatory communication still lacks an accurate definition that could contribute to a better understanding of the notion. But perhaps it's not so desperately needed.
Actually, participatory communication may not be defined easily because it cannot be considered a unified model of communication. The eagerness for labels and encapsulated definitions could only contribute to freeze a communication movement that is still shaping itself, and that may be more valuable precisely because of its variety and looseness. The word 'participation' is kaleidoscopic; it changes its colour and shape at the will of the hands in which [it] is held.[1]
The experiences of participatory communication for social change are as diverse as the cultural and geographic settings in which they have been developing. In spite of participatory communication being a relatively recent topic of interest for academics, its history spans over the last fifty years, from the time Radio Sutatenza started in a remote area of Colombia and the Bolivian miners organised to set up community radio stations in their mining districts. Latin America has generally been the nest where the first experiences originated. Nonetheless, with the end of authoritarian regimes in Africa and Asia during the past two decades, new experiences of participatory communication for social change have also blossomed in these regions.
The diversity of participatory communication experiences has always been a sign of its healthy status. However, the linkages with development projects aimed at economic and social change have not always been successful. It looks like, at the grassroots level, the need for communication has been deeply felt by the people who took action to make it possible, while at the planning and implementation level of donor and government driven projects there has been little consciousness about change.
The two ends are eventually going to meet, because of the international cooperation for development lessons learned during past decades. Too many projects failed because of vertical planning and implementation and too much funding was channelled to developing nations that never reached the intended beneficiaries until donors and planners started realising that they were doing something wrong. If they had only involved the beneficiaries from the beginning.
Such a simple idea, involving the beneficiaries, didn't come immediately to the minds of international donors and planners, and when it did they were not able to overcome certain obstacles. One of these has been the inertia of channelling cooperation mainly through governments that are often corrupted and insensitive to the needs of their people, and the inability of getting to the real partners in development. In recent years local NGOs and CBOs have proven to be cost-efficient and trustworthy in the eyes of bilateral donors, and even governments.
Cultural barriers, as well as attitudes of arrogance about knowledge and vertical practices, have not allowed donors, planners and governments to establish a dialogue with communities of beneficiaries. Indigenous knowledge is at best perceived as an acceptable claim from communities, but rarely considered as one of the main components of development.
Communication has been neglected for too long in development projects, and still is. Even when development organisations and staff realise today that beneficiaries have to be involved, they fail to understand that without communication there can be no long-term dialogue with communities. The fact that development projects are mostly in the hands of economists and technicians impedes the understandingof social and cultural issues that are key to a communication strategy.
Too often communication was mistakenly conceived as propaganda or, in the best scenario, as information dissemination, but seldom seen as dialogue. International donors and implementers, governments and NGOs, crave communication when the objective is to gain visibility. Consequently they concentrate on the use of mass media or worse, billboards, paid advertising in journals and generally on mediaactivities that have an impact in the cities, rather than in the poorest rural areas.
There has been an evolution in the concepts of development; nonetheless projects have evolved from not taking communication into account, framing it only as a propaganda or reporting tool. Massive campaigns through mass media, especially for health projects, proved difficult to sustain without permanent funding. Moreover the campaigns have not contributed to establishing dialogue with communities. Since the inception, these projects were exogenous to the beneficiaries and too general to be culturally accepted in countries where cultural and ethnic diversity is high. Development organisations from the United States, that largely promoted the marketing of social goods, had to invest additional funds in self-promotion in order to get attention in developing countries.
The concept of establishing a dialogue with beneficiaries all along the process of conceiving, planning, implementing and evaluating a project has been gradually consolidating. At first, implementers understood that beneficiaries should be involved in the activities leading tosocial and economic development of a community, for the purpose of building up a sense of ownership within the community. This was at last perceived as important especially in terms of the sustainability of the project once the external inputs ended.
Next, planners realised that the sense of ownership couldn't bepromoted if the beneficiaries didn't have a word in the decisions made before a particular project started. For example, the simple issue of deciding where to dig a borehole and place a hand pump could reveal the complexity of internal relations within a rural community. Technical people that had often seen communities as a homogenous human universe went through a learning process that helped them realise that a community as the society at large is also a composite of interest groups, rich and poor, whose cultural complexity has to be understood beforehand.
The concept of participatory development has lead to a greater level of understanding of the role of communication for development. More projects now include communication staff and budget funds specifically assigned to communication activities. This has also revealed the lack of trained communicators for development; actually, this specialty seldom exists in universities. Among the thousands of academic institutions that produce journalists, only a very few offer training for people interested in communication for development.
- It seems there are more than 300 communications schools in Latin America, training over 120,000 students. Most of these training centres aim to prepare communications professionals for the mass media, the advertising industry, the so-called business communications and public relations. There is not one single school of communications really training communicators for development, scientific communicators or pedagogic communicators. In part, that is the very reason why we find such a distressing situation in the field of communication for development. It is very difficult to understand the reason why that type of communications school and university faculties continue to proliferate while there are not enough jobs for the newly graduated. Our society needs schools that form another kind of communicator, those that do not exist right now, at least not in the quantities that are needed. [2]
Comments of Manuel Calvelo
Communicators for development are a rare species. Most of those that correspond to such a profile are self-made communicators coming from other disciplines, who turned to communications because they identified the real need by working on development projects. Agronomists, sociologists, rural extension workers and facilitators have turned into much better development communicators than journalists which are often too biased towards mass media andvertical practices.
One very important obstacle for including participatory communication components in development projects is the donors' need for scale, which either paralyses cooperation or leads to gigantic and artificial projects that result in equally resounding failures. White elephants as we refer in Spanish to those expensive and gigantic projects that never move have done much more harm than good to developing countries. The issue of scale is often related to the donor's political agenda and internal administrative regulations rather than to development needs. The requirements of proving success in the short-term (the annual report syndrome) or measuring a project in numbersof beneficiaries (the higher the better), while excluding qualitative aspects and long-term benefits, have lead to projects that are only successful while funding is available.
In a more reasonable framework for development, scale would have to do with linking communities with similar issues of concern and facilitating exchanges, instead of multiplying models that clash with culture and tradition.
The macro level is often a trap in a world diverse in cultures and rich in differences. Going to scale is not always the right long-term solution and massive models cannot replace bottom-up networking.The international donor community is still reluctant to acknowledge 3 or 40 years of failures and millions down the drain because of ill-planned macro programmes. The eagerness to go fast, to showshort-term results, and to extend coverage to large numbers of people has actually backfired.
It has also distorted the role of communication, which has been largely misused for the purpose of institutional visibility, and seldom as a development device. Mass media has been privileged over other communication tools, with the results that we know: enormous investments, which do not leave anything at the grassroots level once the technical assistance and the funding are withdrawn.
If real changes are expected in the way communication is applied in development projects, we first need to see changes inside the donor and implementing organisations. Those changes could involve using communication strategies from the initial stages of planning a programme or project for example, by allocating a fixed percentage of the total budget to communication activities. Also, changes are needed that will affect the profile of the project staff by incorporating development communicators rather than publicists, and sociologists rather than journalists. Maybe at some point we will all understand better that macro is not just a matter of mega, but also a matter of participation of the intended beneficiaries. And participation has never been massive if it is driven from the top.
Some progress has been made, though not enough, in terms of gradually involving beneficiaries at the planning and implementing stages of a project. However, the evaluation of programmes and projects is still a donor driven exercise, which remains external and vertical to the beneficiaries. Surprisingly enough, the whole evaluation system seems totally outdated to deal with participatory development; nevertheless it is still very strongly present. Other than the fact that institutions specialised in doing evaluations represent an industry by itself, there is another reason that explains its current predominance: by contracting private evaluators donors keep control over evaluations.
If we look at it rationally, there are important contradictions in the manner most evaluations are done today, and the main contradiction is that beneficiaries are cut off from the process, seen only as objects of study and not subjects that can contribute to the evaluation process. The following are some aspects that obscure the results of many evaluations.
First of all, the fact that donors and/or implementers sponsor the evaluations of their own projects has an impact on the quality of results; evaluators are likely to be biased to a lesser or larger extent since they depend on future contracts with the same or similar organisations. Second, who decides on the very objectives of an evaluation? Who will mainly benefit from the evaluation: is it the beneficiariesor the organisation that contracts it? The objectives of evaluations usually respond to institutional agendas.
Third, evaluations are often done by experts with little knowledge about the cultural, political and social context, nor do they speak the language; these are mainly consultants from private companies based in the United States or Europe. Very few projects hire national or Third World consultants with a background that facilitates a higher understanding of local culture. Occasionally United Nations development agencies exchange south-south consultants for this purpose, which is already an improvement.
Fourth, the battery of evaluation instruments is usually taken from already existing models. It's usually adapted for a particular project without sufficient consultation with the grassroots communities and with little consideration of cultural aspects.
Fifth, for statistical purposes, most of the evaluations avoid open questions and concentrate on checklist type formats that aim to obtain numbers and percentages as opposed to qualitative assessments.
Finally, the timing of evaluations is habitually donor driven and has no relevance to really measuring the benefits of a project to the community. Often evaluations are done just by the conclusion of an institutional intervention, thus capturing a picture of the development process at its best moment.
The type of information that an evaluation may bring is often of more use to the implementers than to the beneficiaries. Problems of inaccuracy of information may also obscure the results and interpretation. Inaccuracy is not only related to the inputs for example in relation to an AIDS campaign but often with the lack of knowledge on the culture and forms of organisation of respondents. The evidence that evaluators are looking for, may be distorted by the existing gap between the evaluators and the community.
The bottom line is that the evaluation process should also integrate dialogue as an essential tool. The whole concept of evaluationis to be reassessed. During the past decades we have finally moved towards the concept of people-centred development and towards a people-centred communication model. It is time to move towards people-centred evaluation models.
This has happened already at the grassroots level in some of the most interesting examples of participatory communication. During their four decades of growth and development, there were no formal external evaluations of the Bolivian miners' radio stations; but the fact is that their constituency constantly and permanently evaluated the stations and actually directed the process through continuous dialogue.
Honest and useful evaluations will only be possible when donors and implementers are ready to surrender their institutional agendas. Are they prepared to do so? If they are, evaluation should become a process that involves the beneficiaries from the beginning, setting the objectives of an evaluation process.
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