Setting Agendas

Click here to download a Power Point presentation of this document.

Outline

• The global context
• Changing development strategies and thinking
• Debates over knowledge and the changing communication environments
• Changing nature of development problems
• Unprecedented opportunities for and importance of role of communication - but also major threats

Starting Point No. 1: Globalisation

• societies have less capacity to shape and control their own future, and economically strong societies do more to shape the economic, political and cultural environments of economically weak societies than vice versa
• poverty alleviation and empowerment cannot happen in isolation from other places and other issues - all is connected
• Both globalisation and the protests against it not reflected by level of public debate in the South

Globalisation - countervailing forces

• The strength of civil society and globally organised protest (Seattle) - enabled through ICTs
• Globalisation links the global to the community - ICTs enable people and organisations to do the same
• Corporate PR and power not always working - those in power being forced to engage and respond: Monsanto; World Bank;

2. Changes in Development Strategies

• Shrinking development assistance funding
• Renewed ambition - poverty reduction targets
• Development strategies benefiting from more “joined up” government - e.g. debt
• Emphasis on political and policy environment - the rise of “good governance” and recognition of importance of civil society and context of assistance

Changes in Development Strategies

• More participatory, people-centred development - empowerment focused;
• Beyond the project: more co-ordinated, coherent, 'owned' development strategies - e.g.
• Comprehensive Development Framework; PRSPs
• Potential downgrading in conditionality
• Donors exposing policies to public debate
• Recognition of role of “knowledge” in development

3. Rise of the Network Society - ICTs

• ICTs and 'knowledge' centred development
• Capacity of people to access knowledge and information for themselves massively increased
• Capacity for networking and horizontal communications increased - a complex communications environment
• Economic and social development dependent on extent to which societies can become more knowledge based (GKII)
• This in turn dependent on societies mapping out their own responses to opportunities provided by ICTs (ADF)

The debates over knowledge

• Some of most successful (development) use of ICTs not about delivery or access to knowledge but networking and debate
• Extending infrastructure can only happen with private sector - jury is out re: role of development assistance
• Strategies to provide access to ICTs for the poorest often unclear in their results - but high levels of learning between organisations
• As in other areas, pilot projects proliferate
• Policy environment is critical
• Knowledge not the same as information, but sense people make of information

Network Society and the other information revolution

• Liberalisation of media, especially broadcast media
• Rise of community media
• Greater media freedom
• More entertaining, attractive, popular programming
• The rise of the discussion programme - phone-ins etc.
• Convergence - e.g. internet and radio

3. Changes in development challenges - the legacy of Cairo

• Reproductive Health and Rights - untying the social straightjacket
• providing services is not enough
• political and legal change is essential - but also insufficient
• the broader social context also needs to change

Changes in development challenges

HIV/AIDS

• strategy has been to impart accurate, targeted information, often at specific population groups (women, young people, drug users, men);
• but not to enable societies to take ownership of the issue, to discuss it in terms that has meaning, that allows inaccuracy.

An unprecedented opportunity

• An international climate of debate and openness
• the power of new communications technologies
• a media revolution that is enabling unprecedented public debate
• For societies and communities increasingly to forge their own development agendas through informed, inclusive public debate
• For external actors and those with money and power to work within those agendas
• For large scale social change within countries

Unprecedented threats

• Domination of the channels of communication by narrow economic and political interests
• Danger of increasingly centralised, unimaginative, centrally driven development policies
• The trend is of accellerating economic and political marginalisation of the poorest nations and the poorest within those nations
• Survival in the South requires sacrifices in the North (e.g. global warming)

Some implications

• Communication - no either/or approaches to communication, but different approaches depend on each other;
• increasingly, purposeful communications can't succeed or be sustainable without reference to a wider enabling environment
• as much as it is about education or persuasion, development communication is about enabling people to shape their own priorities and providing access:
  
  - to information;
  
  - to power;
  
  - to channels of communication that enable people to make their voices heard
• Create channels beyond the community to the mainstream
• Focus on creating an enabling environment (policy, communications, project) as much as on specific project interventions
• Create channels beyond the community to the mainstream
• Moving beyond the project - make connections: between themes, between levels (community, national, international)

Some challenges

• Most organisations doing communications work do so on a project basis, normally sectorally, not on creating enabling environments
• Need for parallel strategies using all approaches and experiences at our disposal

Some questions

• How essential is accuracy in communications?
• Are we prepared to let people make their own mistakes and learn from them?
• Are we prepared to surrender institutional agendas?

Some characteristics that inform Panos' work

• Process of producing information can be as important as the information itself
• Provide information that enables people to let their own minds up about issues - a range of perspectives
• As accessible and publicly available as possible - accuracy regarded as critical
• Feed in the perspectives of those most affected by development issues
• Building capacity woven into all that we do
• Making connections between all levels - community, national, global and vice-versa
• Accountability needs to be clear, formal and structured
• Unafraid of placing (difficult) issues on agenda but limited agenda of our own

from James Deane, Executive Director of The Panos Institute