New Approaches in Communication and Community Development

Ketan Chitnis
UNICEF. New York

Moving Targets: Mapping the Paths between Communication, Technology and Social Change in Communities, Jan Servaes and Shuang Liu (Eds.). Penang, Malaysia: Southbound, 2007, ISBN 978-983-9054-50-7, paper, 275 pp.

Jan Servaes is without exception a pioneer, a scholar and a prolific writer of theory, practice and institutional dimensions of communication for development (C4D). His work over the past two decades, on participatory communication, remains unmatched, especially in North America and Western Europe. Hence, Moving Targets, edited by Jan Servaes and Shuang Liu, appealed to me - a practitioner and former scholar of communication for development - instantly. Moving Targets introduces a dozen or so new and upcoming C4D scholars and researchers from Asia, thereby expanding the knowledge base and presenting new ideas. I felt the book is particularly promising as it seeks to expand the boundaries of the practice of communication for social change specifically with the focus on communication technologies.

Readers would benefit from the range of issues and topics covered by Moving Targets – engaging and working with communities, using information community technology (ICTs) for fostering participation and two-way communication and facilitating community transformation i.e. social change among the most marginalized and vulnerable population groups. Across all these issues communication is either the central or the mediating factor facilitating and contributing to collective change processes. However, for me, the biggest disappointment of the book is an almost total lack of theory (except for structuration theory and the communicative ecologies concept) in explicating how and why sustainable development occurs. While there are multiple theories that posit how sustainable social change is possible, the field of C4D is in need of newer models and more explicit evidence based on theories – a gap that I was hoping this book could at least begin to explore.

Despite the lack of theoretical basis, the dozen or so case studies, projects and research topics that the editors have selected for the book are impressive. The common thread weaving the various chapters is the focus on the “community” as the focus of development, and hence the unit of analyses of research studies. This captures the departure in development thinking, policy and implementation of moving away from development of nation states to community and sub-national level impact of development programs. Likewise, in communication, this departure juxtaposes with the move from “individual” centered deficit model of learning, behavior development and change to a “collective” and “community” focused model of participation, appreciation and equity. Going a step further, the book deconstructs community from a homogenous entity to one that comprises multiple and distinct population groups even in the same geographic location. Thus communities are groups of people that have a common identity such as indigenous groups, aboriginal, women, youth, migrants, virtual and so forth.

Given the breath of topics covered, in this review I will highlight a few essays, which I believe make substantial contributions to the field of C4D: a) Malawi’s Rural Growth Centers Project by Mphande, b) Information, communication, povery and voice by Tacchi, c) Beyond the digital divide by Watson, d) Immigration: A force of development and social change by Monteiro and Cruickshank, and e) Transnational migrants and ICTs by Pola. Readers could benefit from knowing that despite the important topics covered not all of the dozen essays are thorough in their analysis, implication and conclusions for the way forward. Evidence and arguments in some essays are much more compelling than others.

In Malawi’s Rural Growth Centers Project (RGCP), an essay aptly titled Old Habits Die Hard, Mphande uses critical discourse analysis, a rarely employed methodology in C4D research, to reveal how stated goals and goals that are actually pursued are often different in development projects. The essay reveals that the rural growth project, established in 1979 and modified periodically, was aimed at providing the largely agrarian rural economy of Malawi with alternative options for socio-economic growth, especially for subsistence farmers. The analysis reveals that RGCP became a tool to endorse and implement the government’s agricultural strategy as opposed to an industrial growth approach as was highlighted in the project document and public communication materials. A nuanced reading of the project documents reveal that while in principle RGCP was aimed as an equity tool the way in which it was implemented did not provide communities with the means to improved livelihood. Community engagement remained more as tokenism rather than true participation of communities (subsistence farmers) in implementing the growth centers project.

Tacchi’s case study on, Information, Communication, Poverty and Voice, deconstructs the role of “voice” in community-based media and ICT across the following: (1) poor peoples ability to influence media content, (2) community voice in research, monitoring and evaluation, and (3) poor people’s voice in influencing policy. The essay draws upon several United Nations and World Bank documents to substantiate the centrality of listening to the poor as an important part of development programming aimed at “providing voice to the voice-less”. Tacchi argues that new communication technology ranging from the internet, low-power community radios, and other platforms made available by ICTs have the potential to provide “vernacular creativity” to ensure local specificities drive the content as opposed to reliance on skilled content providers that traditional media rely upon. Likewise, research methodologies such as Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPAs), based on the premise that the poor people themselves are true experts on poverty, uses exploratory, participatory and qualitative data to bring researchers and the researched closer together and thereby ensuring that the researched (often the poor) have a voice in the research process. Finally, the essay also details how innovative use of ICTs can provide a channel for the poor and the voiceless to be heard by decision makers and the general public beyond the immediate community.

Beyond the Digital Divide by Watson explores the digital divide through a framework of technology for social inclusion and the concept of communicative ecologies. The premise of this essay is that rather than approaching ICTs as a means to bridge remote and isolated communities, research and application of ICTs could benefit by leveraging the existing communication network among indigenous people’s lives (ecology). Watson explores ‘what constitutes meaningful access to ICTs’ and recommends that social inclusion become the cornerstone from the outset of planning and research of projects for the excluded and vulnerable groups such as indigenous people.

Monteiro and Cruickshank’s essay on Immigration: A Force of Development and Social Change takes a refreshing look at how cultural identities among immigrant communities are shaped and negotiated through communication and media. Based on the use of international and ethnic media consumed by the Indian, Chinese and South African diasporas in New Zealand the authors tease out dialectical forces of the global and the local that each community seeks to retain. The analysis puts forth the argument that due to increased mobility and growth of communication media through which migrant groups can stay in touch with their home country, today’s migrant population negotiate a bicultural identify as opposed to the migrants of the 20^th century. Authors argue that the media play a supportive and a facilitative role in the acculturation process of the immigrants but the media fall short of helping the host country population groups to understand immigrants’ cultural capital.

The essay on Transnational Migrants and ICTs by Pola extends the argument of traditional media use to the use of interactive new technologies as a preferred means of communicating, conducting business, and promoting political and religious ideas among transnational migrants. Moreover, the author finds that the Internet being anonymous and decentralized provides a critical platform for social networking among communities with common values, identities and ideologies. The essay pulls together research on how immigrant communities draw upon a host of communication media to reinforce family and community ties with their home country as well as participate in the public sphere through practices such as voting. The essay concludes, based on multiple field-based and online ethnographic studies, that immigrants tend to form new collective networks through the transnational and global media, as they become part of a virtual community while retaining their original ties and identify. Given that immigration is one of the forces for social change, the two essays on migrant populations suggest new means to include and reach these often invisible groups through ICTs.

Towards the end, my opinion of Moving Targets remains mixed. The editors could have helped the reader with a clear definition or explanation of what social change means within the context of communication and technology. Moreover, the diverse projects and cases that form the core of the essays do not help in clarifying what is social change. There is also lack of clarity with regards to whether social change is a means or an end in itself for vulnerable and marginalized communities to be able to become part of the mainstream development agenda. But perhaps, this was intended to be so, and it is up to the reader to judge the social transformative power of ICTs in bringing communities toward the center of development practice. The book however pushes forward the social change agenda by presenting a mosaic of evidence –s mall scale and large scale projects as well as varied applications of ICTs – on how community engagement and participation can be easily facilitated by new communication media.