Tom Jacobson's blog

I am asked by the CommGAP team if I would be willing to post a note on the occasion of Jürgen Habermas's 80th birthday. I am grateful for being asked, and especially pleased at the moment of reflection on a remarkable life that this requires.  
 

Of course, his work on the relationship between communication and democratization is widely celebrated. Somewhat ruefully for some of us, since it always seems that one has just finished struggling through an engagement with his latest work when he produces yet another, often in a different field of scholarship: first the public sphere, then reason, then ethics, then law, and most recently religion. But, not to complain. These efforts are all connected together in a system of thought that has the subject of deliberative democracy at its core.
 

Our good friend Amartya Sen checks-in recently with an essay in the New York Review of Books (March 26, which I am just getting to).  Our good friend, because as a leading economist he is also a serious and long standing student of development challenges given his work on poverty, income distribution, famine, and so on.  The occasion of this particular NYRB essay is the ongoing financial crisis.  In it, he addresses recent calls for a “new economics,” as exemplified in the "New World, New Capitalism" symposium held in Paris in January, hosted by Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair. The idea, as Blair proposed, is to call for a new financial order based on “values other than the maximum short-term profit.”

A notable new initiative in development training has recently been undertaken by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  In October the Foundation released a request for proposals to establish Masters in Development Practice (MDP) programs worldwide. This RFP is the outcome of a year long effort by the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, established in early 2007, also supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The aim of the Commission was to identify the core disciplines and areas of expertise needed to develop a global network for interdisciplinary training in sustainable development.

Like Sina, I too was recently in Cape Town as part of a team of trainers delivering a course titled 'People, Politics and Change: Communication Approaches for Governance Reform'. The participants were 29 senior government officials from 10 different African countries. The thoughts Sina expressed in his post reflect well the rich learning experience for all involved. What strikes me in hindsight is how this learning, and the country participants’ enthusiasm for it, verified the complex skill set required of communication in support of governance reform efforts. Here is what I mean.

I was fortunate yesterday to attend the launch of a report by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA). Funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), CIMA has assessed U.S. efforts to support media development worldwide. The launch was for its augural report, “Empowering Independent Media: U.S. Efforts to Foster Free and Independent News Media Around the World.” 

Anne-Katrin notes in her post “Defining the Public Sphere (In Three Paragraphs)” that the idea of the public sphere may not be clearly understood. Addressing this problem she claims, “Two-way communications between citizens and public officials constitute the public sphere, therefore we need free and independent media systems that facilitate this two-way flow of communication.”

The number of governance reform processes in which communication plays a role appears to be vast. Which of these are of vital importance?  How exactly can communication help? And what does research have to tell us? A new volume of edited work offers one set of answers to such questions.  Governance Reform Under Real World Conditions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice is a project of the Communication for Governance & Accountability Program (CommGAP).