The Drum Beat 93: Making Waves - The Strategy

This is the 2nd in the series of The Drum Beats focused on Making Waves - the recent book on participatory communication for social change by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, published by The Rockefeller Foundation [a partner in The Communication Initiative].



In this issue the focus is on the concept, principles and lessons for effective communication that have been drawn from the communication experiences described in the book.



For a more complete outline of the communication concepts that underpin Making Waves, see the Foreword by Denise Gray-Felder and the Introduction by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron.



Please note: The following quotes have been excerpted directly from the text. The sub-headings have been created for The Drum Beat.



Also note: The English version of "Making Waves" is out of print and will not be reprinted. It is available in full here as an HTML paginated presentation, and from both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Communication for Social Change Consortium as PDF downloads. For more details as well as access to PDF downloads and the French and Spanish translations, please click here.




COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE



1. "The experiences of participatory communication for social change are as diverse as the cultural and geographic settings in which they have been developing."



2. "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."



DIFFICULTY OF DESCRIBING



3. "Capturing the essence of participatory communication on paper is by definition an illusive challenge. From the work I've witnessed, helped direct, or just monitored during a long career in communication, my observation is that the most interesting work of a participatory nature can often defy the written word."

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Babel, The Bank, Genes & Ethics - the recipe for?....
[and what will you see tomorrow?]

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Check for Tempo. New news Tuesday & Friday.


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PRINCIPLES



4. "...empowering people living in poor communities across the world to seize control of their own life stories and begin to change their circumstances of poverty, discrimination and exclusion..."



5. ...The power of community decision-making and action..."



6. "...voice...hearing about the lives and circumstances of the poor and excluded in words and terms that they themselves use."



7. ...support for projects that return to traditional forms of communication: drama, dance, music, puppets, drums, storytelling and dialogue circles...have come to appreciate the true power of face-to-face and voice-to-voice communication."



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Gas cylinders...missiles... and children?...[and tomorrow?]

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8. "...community ownership [is] present - The community itself had to be in charge of the communication initiative, even if the community had not originated it... Project appropriated by the community. [Ideally] a community runs the communication initiative in all aspects: financing, administration, training, technical, etc."



9. "...communication adopt[s] different forms according to need...no blueprint model can impose itself over the richness of views and cultural interactions."



10. "The dynamic 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.



11. "...experiences well-established at the community level, not just one-time projects with a lifespan limited by donor's inputs."



12. "...[communication] initiative should be rooted into the community's daily life."



13. "...strengthen democratic values, culture and peace...reinforcing the community based organisations and allowing the majority to have a voice."



14. "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.



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The country with the highest TB per capita in the world is....?

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scroll down to Base Line.



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PERSPECTIVE



15. "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, Beltran 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."



16. "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."



CRITIQUE



17. "...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."



18. "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 channeling cooperation mainly through governments that are often corrupted and insensitive to the needs of their people..."



19. "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."



20. "Indigenous knowledge is at best perceived as an acceptable claim from communities, but rarely considered as one of the main components of development."



21. "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 under- stand that without communication there can be no long-term dialogue with communities."



22. "Too often communication was mistakenly conceived as propaganda or, in the best scenario, as information dissemination, but seldom seen as dialogue."



23. "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 ..."



24. "Massive campaigns through mass media, especially for health projects, proved difficult to sustain without permanent funding...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. [for example] 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."



25. "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....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."



26. "Surprisingly enough, the whole evaluation system seems totally outdated to deal with participatory development...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...[and]...evaluations are often done by experts with little knowledge about the cultural, political and social context, nor do they speak the language..."



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The full text of Making Waves is online.

Click here



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The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.



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