Part 1: Immediate action or necessary reflection (from the Background Paper for Communication for Development Roundtable)

There have been many debates over communication interventions over recent years, and the Communication for Social Change arguments outlined above constitute just one of them. These debates perhaps lead to a more fundamental set of of questions facing communicators.

The international community is responding and has responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis and this response provides a possibly unrepeatable opportunity to make major progress in containing HIV/AIDS. A new and welcome atmosphere of urgency and energy has been created by organisations (such as Unicef and others represented at the roundtable) which has helped galvanise the international response.

Arguably (and very simplistically), there are three responses being proposed by communicators in response to UNGASS and the increased political priority being given to the epidemic.

There is an "emergency" response, with many agencies and highly committed communication practitioners arguing that we have learned a very great deal about HIV/AIDS and human sexual behaviour over the last 15 (and more) years and that the epidemic is now so devastating that we need to rapidly scale up the time, resources and energies putting the strategies we've already developed into action on the ground, and less time theorising about what need needs to be done. They argue that the international attention now focused on the epidemic, and funding from donors will not last unless results are achieved rapidly, but the opportunity presents itself now.

That means a major scaling up of operations now. While the response to the AIDS fund has been disappointing, nevertheless much larger sums of money from both public and private sources are available and there is a need to dispense these in highly targeted programmes which take the best of what has worked in the past and combine these with innovative new approaches.

The emphasis here is on urgent action and large scale mass mobilisation of resources and programming, a putting into wide scale practice the strategies that have worked in the past. While proponents of this response acknowledge the risks, in terms of potential lack of indigenous ownership of large scale responses of this kind, they argue that the benefits and urgency outweigh the risk, and in any case African and other governments and societies are increasingly engaged in shaping agendas around the epidemic.

On the other hand, there are those who raise fundamental questions about the strategies that have been employed to date and argue that it is precisely the demand for quick, measurable results that has created a field heavily made up of of large, donor driven, top down communication interventions which have, they argue, proved both unsustainable in securing behaviour change and have not addressed the underlying causes of the epidemic.

They argue that the scale and severity of the epidemic, despite the efforts made to contain it, suggests that a reassessment of strategy is necessary. They argue that major international interventions have sometimes been introduced at the expense of communities and societies taking the ownership and leadership of the fights against HIV/AIDS on for themselves.

They argue that the issues of sex and sexuality, and the intimate links between HIV and poverty, HIV and discrimination and HIV and marginalisation suggest much more complex, bottom up strategies aimed at community empowerment, horizontal forms of communication and less rigid and (therefore less easily measurable) sets of interventions.

They also argue that the increasing complexity of developing country societies, prompted by greater liberalisation, more complex media systems, and more complex and horizontal communication patterns in society demand fresh thinking and approaches.