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Public Sentinel: News Media & Governance Reform, Pippa Norris, editor |
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Governments and development agencies have devoted many years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing democratic governance in countries around the world. The idea of creating democracies is still the primary driver of many governance improvement agendas. Clearly, democratic systems often bring with them improvements in governance and economic development, but simply putting a democracy into place is not enough. 
“Our definition of propaganda focuses on the communication process – most specifically, on the purpose of the process: Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”
An instructor in Law School was the first to explain to me the nature of 'deal anxiety' as a problem for business; now I know that it is a problem for governance reform as well. For a lawyer 'deal anxiety' manifests when a client - usually a business executive - is so anxious to close a business deal she ignores the need for her attorney to exercise due diligence over the contract. For instance, what happens if there is a dispute? What dispute resolution mechanisms might be needed? What about conflict of laws if it is an international contract? Are we going to use the laws of the domicile of Party A or Party B? And so on. You'd be amazed how many business leaders just want to shake hands on the deal, and get on with 'the real business of making money', until something goes wrong and both sides reach for their lawyers ...as cowboys reach for guns. Then you have a shoot out.
Many (some say all) organisational, institutional or government communications efforts are about influence and/or behaviour change. A point often missed is that communications cannot be a bolt-on activity that happens in isolation from other actions. If you are generally “making friends” with your audience, it will be a lot easier to influence them – as J.S.Knox writes “You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time.” Time and time again I come across well-educated policy formers, peace builders, and frontline campaigners who are attempting to build a strategy for their work without including an element of strategic communications from the outset. There is a need to grasp that every activity you are engaged in will influence (there is no such thing as “not communicating” – everything sends a message). So, the way the phone is answered, your level of cultural awareness, the tone of an email, the policies you promote, and physical campaigns (e.g. military/peacekeeping/law enforcement activity) will all have an impact on your effectiveness to communicate other messages.
For the record, I don’t believe the hype that people are only interested in bad news. I think as humans we are intrigued by “dramatic” – but not that this has to be necessarily “negative”. I proved it to myself recently.
In this blog I am addressing the second of the 
Just before the holidays I participated in a UN conference on the role of the public sphere in post-conflict societies. The one-day event, titled “Media and Communication in Peacebuilding” was organized by the UN Department of Public Information (DPI) in collaboration with the United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office. The goal of the conference was to review the international community’s contribution to enhance communication between governments, media, civil society and citizens as part of integrated peacebuilding efforts to assist countries emerging from conflict.
Communicating change is a specialist field. PR and HR companies charge a small fortune for seminars on the subject. Whilst corporate and government communicators wrestle to understand how they might persuade colleagues that important, imminent, organisational changes are good for them - so that they can achieve that all important "buy-in" which leads to the shiny path of success - organisations are using change as a selling point or a process improvement to their customers.
The reason I chose such a title is due to the difficulty of mainstreaming (i.e., understanding and institutionalizing) the emerging conception of communication in development required to support and address the challenges in the current process of democratization, especially when dealing with governance issues. It has been difficult to transform into reality what Rogers in 1976 had saluted as the passing of the dominant paradigm – that is, abandoning the linear, top-down communication model with pre-defined objectives and messages to persuade individuals to change, and substitute it with a more horizontal, open-ended one to engage individuals in defining change and act on it.
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