April 2009

The third of the ten key issues about development communication is a crucial one and it asserts that there is a significant difference between development communication and other types of communication. What is the difference and why is important? Let us start by defining communication’s most renowned function; i.e. informing audiences and/or trying to persuade them to change attitudes or behavior. Communication is almost exclusively identified this way. However, the interdisciplinary area of development communication is not exclusively and not even primarily about information or persuasion.

There is a global debate going on concerning why the global financial crisis erupted. The technical debate is what it is; so far there is far more heat than light. But in addition to the technical debate is a debate about how certain underlying assumptions about human nature entertained by economists and even famous central bankers have turned out to be incorrect. It turns out that human beings - as consumers, investors, bankers, stock traders - have not behaved in precisely the ways "rigorous" economic theories predicted that they would. Even Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, showed his surprise at human nature at a congressional hearing late last year: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."

"Public opinion seems to achieve integration: the individuals trying to avoid isolation are ready to compromise, thereby furnishing society with some common ground which, as is generally acknowledged, is a condition for the society's survival. Public opinion seems to stabilize societies. Partly this is a consequence of integration but it is more. Political scientists interested in developing societies complain that the lack of public opinion, or of an infrastructure of consensus among persons interested in the political sphere, leads to extreme and frequent upheavals. Public opinion establishes priorities. In the field of communication research, this is called the agenda-setting function. It dictates what problems society deems to be its most urgent tasks. Public opinion confers legitimation. It is striving for consensus (exerting strong conformity pressure on the individuals), defending established norms, or creating those which in turn will be legally sanctioned. This is the meaning of 'all governments rest on opinion.'"

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

A reader's comment to the blog post Whose Will Constitutes 'Political Will'?

"Political will" is surely one of the more elusive terms in the international development community.  Sina captures much of its ambiguity well in his posting.  In addition to what it is, we might also ask where political will comes from.  In some cases it originates with an individual, generally situated somewhere within the state apparatus (best if at a high level) who becomes the "champion" that Sina refers to.   But political will can also stem from civil society advocacy that puts enough pressure on the state to develop the political will needed to bring about action.  The civil rights movement in the USA had champions over many decades, and they made some progress (e.g., Eleanor Roosevelt and the Marian Anderson singing controversy of 1939, recently commemorated on its 70th anniversary at Lincoln Memorial this past Easter in Washington).  So there was some political will in high places that helped.  President Truman's desegregation of the US military in 1948 offers another example.  But it took another 20 years and a huge, sustained civil society effort to accumulate the pressure needed to strengthen political will sufficiently to pass the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. So it was a combination of political will on the inside and civil society on the outside that moved civil rights along over the years, with each reinforcing the other.  More recent examples abound (e.g., environment, women's movement). Analyzing the synergy involved and crafting ways to support it should be a critical focus of CommGAP.

Harry Blair

There's nothing worse that can happen to a young scholar at her first conference presentation than having one of the big founders of one's academic field sit in the first row and stare intently at her poor little PowerPoint presentation. This happened to me with Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, one of the most eminent figures in the field of contemporary communication studies. She's eminent for a good reason, and also very relevant to our field of communication and governance.

Protests are erupting in many parts of the world. Television screens are filled with images of restive citizens challenging power. Now, a debate has erupted on-line regarding whether or not the protests of today matter as well as the fabled efforts of movements past - Gandhi in India, King in the United States and so on.

"Research on political participation has identified a number of deep-seated norms and values that are positively associated with the amount and quality of democratic engagement.  One of the most central of these is political efficacy, or the sense that one's participation can actually make a difference (internal efficacy) and that the political system would be responsive to this participation (external efficacy)... Although political efficacy is affected by a number of demographic, contextual, and cultural factors, the media plays an important role in its formation and expression."   

                                              Michael X. Delli Carpini (2004)*

Photo credit: Jim Roese photography

*Delli Carpini, M. X. (2004). Mediating Democratic Engagement: The Impact of Communications on Citizens' Involvement in Political and Civic Life. In L. L. Kaid (Ed.), Handbook of Political Communication Research (pp. 395-434). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

In this blog I am addressing the second of the ‘Ten Key Issues on (Development) Communication’ that states that there is a sharp and profound difference about a good everyday communicator and a professional communicator. I apologize to those of you who have this distinction clear in your minds and find this an obvious point. Unfortunately, many, too many, managers and decision makers in development institutions do not always seem to understand the difference between the two.

I have heard many times the sentence ‘He/she is a good communicator’, a seemingly positive statement. However it is a statement that can be rather frustrating when used interchangeably to denote a person skillful in presenting ideas and points of view and a person with a professional expertise in the field of communication.

A reader's response to the blog post, If Force and Incentives Fail...Then What?:

'Asked if he believed in clubs for women, comedian W.C. Fields replied, 'only if all other methods of persuasion fail.'

Governments can and do use brute force, but if governments want the active support of coalitions of stakeholders, rarely can they rely on top-down commmunication alone.

Metternich said 'you can do everything with a bayonet except sit on it,' meaning force has its limits. Consensus is built by dialogue, ensuring that every stakeholder gets some benefit, or at least enough stakeholders. Yes, that means persuasion to show people how they stand to benefit from change. But also it often requires adjusting our offers to suit their demands.

As follow-up to CommGAP's workshop "Generating Genuine Demand for Social Accountability Mechanisms" we're working on publishing an edited volume on this issue with Berkeley-Professor Taeku Lee. Looking through the chapters for this book I puzzled over a quite original approach to accountability: information processing. Arthur Lupia, one of our authors and Professor at the University of Michigan, takes a cognitive approach and explains how people's beliefs have to be changed in order to make them demand accountability.