A Review of the Literature:
Defining the Debates of the Dominant Discourse
Definitions and the evolution of relevant theoretical frameworks
The role of communication in development processes has attracted the attention of many scholars and development professionals since it was first defined in the early 1960s. Though it has been studied and practiced for more than 40 years, there remains a lack of consensus over use of the term itself, and how it should be interpreted and applied. Both at the theory and research levels, as well as at the levels of policy and planning/implementation, there are many divergent perspectives.
The concept of development communication (or the link between development and communication) first emerged with the publication of Daniel Lerner's classic book, The Passing of the Traditional Society (1958). Lerner conducted research in the Middle East and North Africa, and was able to trace correlations between expanded economic activity and other modernization variables such as urbanization, high literacy levels, media consumption and political development – which he defined as voting. Lerner argued that the media could serve as a great multiplier of development by communicating development messages to the undeveloped.
Drawing from Lerner's research, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) commissioned Wilbur Schramm to determine the precise role that the mass media played in development. Schramm believed in the concept of an all-powerful media that could be used by development agents to communicate messages about technological innovations. The result of Schramm's work was published as Mass Media and National Development (1964), and provided the theoretical foundation for development communication for the next 10 to 15 years.
Lasswell (1964) further defined this contextual framework for development communication with his 5-point question of “ Who says what in what channel to whom and with what effect ?” Lasswell was primarily concerned with mass communication and propaganda, but his research is still relevant to development communication.
This early paradigm of development communication advocated for the transfer of technological and behavioural innovations from development agencies to their clients as a panacea for addressing the inequities in developing countries. Around the same time, Everett Rogers put forth his theoretical framework, which he called Diffusion of Innovations (1962). Rogers identified a pattern in the way innovations were adopted and accepted in societies. Grounding much of his research in agricultural development, Rogers asserted that, using his theoretical model, development communication scholars could introduce innovations such as high yield seeds, fertilizers and new farming methods to developing societies.
The diffusion model assumes that a proper combination of mass-mediated and interpersonal communication strategies can move individuals from poor to not-poor via a process starting with awareness (of a new technology or practice) through interest, evaluation, trial and finally to adoption of the technology or practice that is assumed to lead to improved livelihoods.
In support of this hypothesis, diffusion studies proliferated in Latin America , Asia and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. The World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme embraced the theory wholeheartedly and funded thousands of development extension projects, located in rural areas in developing countries, where trained agricultural officers would use media such as radio to expose farmers to these innovations (Mwangi, 2002).
Related to the technology diffusion approach is the concept of social marketing, which stresses the planning and implementation of programs designed to bring about social change using concepts from commercial marketing. Social marketing is significantly different from commercial marketing despite the fact that its hallmark is the borrowing of the latter's concepts and tools (Andreasen, 1995). Alan Andreasen of the Social Marketing Institute says one of these differences is that social marketing is charged with dramatic goals, such as getting all children in developing countries fully immunized by age two (Andreasen, 2001).
Opposing the diffusion of the diffusion theory
In the early 1970s an intellectual shift occurred in the basic conception of development communication when predominately Latin American scholars challenged the dominant paradigm. Critics of the diffusion model were unsettled by its “pro-innovation,” “pro-persuasion” and “top-down” nature – that is, its strong emphasis on adoption and lack of emphasis on recipient input into the development decisions and processes (Colle, 1989). These scholars argued that development efforts to date – and by extension development communication – were ideologically and materially linked to neo-colonialism and a form of domination and manipulation by the elite (Freire, 1973). A group of scholars coalesced around this theme at the First Annual Latin American Seminar on Participatory Communication, concluding that uses of mass media in development imposed the interests of dominant classes on the majority of marginalized people (O'Sullivan-Ryan & Kaplún, 1978). This thinking was in tune with the dependency theory, popular at the time in Latin America , which sought to explain underdevelopment as the result, or by-product, of capitalist expansion (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979). It also resonated with many researchers who called for an abandonment of the “vertical” approach in favour of more “horizontal” methodologies emphasizing access, dialogue and participation (Beltran, 1980).
Much of the inspiration for this shift towards participatory development communication came from the work of Freire (1970), who viewed the traditional diffusion approach as similar to traditional pedagogy, where teachers typically viewed students as in need of knowledge that could be transferred to them in a linear manner. Freire proposed an approach centered on praxis, whereby development practitioners would close the distance between development agent and client, researcher and researched, in order to enter into a co-learning relationship guided by action and reflection. This required development researchers and practitioners to seek out the experiences, understandings and aspirations of others to jointly construct reality and to formulate actions (Beltran, 1980). This line of thinking was later refined by other scholars (Fals Borda 1988; Rahman, 1993), who furthered the assumption that ‘dialogic communication' is the most effective approach to development communication.
This participatory devcom approach is based on a systems framework with an emphasis on horizontal communication — through which the poor are directly involved in the communication process (Bessette & Rajasunderam, 1996). Proponents of this vision sometimes prefer to use different terms, such as participatory communication , or participatory development communication (PDC), implying a greater need to involve local residents in “developing messages they think would be intelligible and persuasive for peers in other communities and in developing and employing the means of conveying such messages” (Uphoff ,1999).
Jan Servaes, professor and head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland and editor-in-chief of Communication for Development and Social Change: A Global Journal , defines the participatory model as that which views ordinary people as the key agents of change, or participants for development. For him, development itself is meant to “liberate and emancipate people and, in so doing, enable them to meet their basic needs” (Servaes, 1999, p. 93). In a survey conducted for this report, Servaes said the essence of development com munication is “the sharing of knowledge aimed at reaching a consensus for action that takes into account the interests, needs and capacities of all concerned. It is thus a social process. Communication media are important tools in achieving this process but their use is not an aim in itself—interpersonal communication too must play a fundamental role” (Servaes, 2005).
Similarly, Gray-Felder and Deane (1999) focused their research on communication for social change, which they defined as a process of public and private dialogue through which people realize “who they are, what they want and how they can get it.” They emphasize that the true power of communication is to give people the confidence and conviction to own the process and the content of communication in their communities.
Srinivas Melkote is a critical theorist who views Rogers ' diffusion approaches as yet another tool to expand the hegemony of the western world. He considers the diffusion approach to be a “message delivery system” that “facilitates the process of modernization via the delivery and insertion of new technologies, and/or inculcating certain values, attitudes, and behaviours in the population” (Melkote & Steeves, 2002 p. 38). According to Melkote, such “persuasive campaigns” are “manipulative and potentially harmful” and are somehow tied up with expatriate extravagance and political corruption.
To truly benefit the poor, Melkote says development projects should harness communication as a practice – but a different form of communication that “emphasizes a process of consensus building and resistance that is historically grounded, culturally sensitive, and multi-faceted, with attention to all the political, economic, and ideological structures and processes that comprise society.” An important focus of development communication is to help in the process of empowering marginalized individuals and groups, such as “women, the poor, minorities, and others who have been consistently and increasingly marginalized in the process of social change.”
Servaes (1997 & 1999) has said the lack of attention to the horizontal dimension has led to failure in many development programs. In Communication for development: one world, multiple cultures (1999), Servaes claims that authentic participation is strongly connected with power and its distribution, and that participation involves the more equitable sharing of both political and economic power, which often leads to the disadvantage of certain groups. Because of that, structural change involves redistribution of power and should occur first in order to establish participatory communication policies.
Melkote implies that Rogers ' diffusion model may be more appropriate in developed than in developing countries. For example, Rogers points out that in the industrialized West, when the rate with which an innovation diffused throughout a social system from the earliest adopter to the last “laggard” was cumulatively plotted over time, an S-shaped curve resulted ( Rogers , 2003: 112). As shown in Figure 1, Rogers believed that the S-shaped curve of diffusion takes off once interpersonal networks become activated in spreading individuals' subjective evaluations of an innovation from peer to peer in a system.
Figure 1: Rogers ' S-shaped curve of diffusion
Melkote and Steeves, however, claim that when these studies were replicated in the developing world, the lacklustre results signified adoption by few people (Melkote & Steeves 2002: 59). Rogers himself acknowledges that innovations have the greatest chance of being adopted in those social systems which had somehow already developed a “climate of acceptance” ( Rogers , 1969).
Reaching across the divide
The attack on Rogers ' theoretical framework may have been a symptom of an aggressive resistance in some quarters of the developing world to what was viewed as neo-colonialism and an attempt by western industrialized nations to force their model of development on the South. In other words, the diffusion theory may have gotten caught up in the backlash against the “modernization paradigm of development” (Servaes, 2002, p. 4), which promotes economic growth through industrialization, urbanization, specialization, adoption of a capitalist economic system, formation of formal infrastructure and the acquisition of technologies.
It is also recognized that much of the early criticism of diffusion may have been well placed, considering the fact that the theory was a product of a time when development professionals believed that what worked for the industrialized countries would work in developing countries. However, while earlier editions of Rogers ' work emphasized the top-down diffusion of technology (1962, 1971), in later editions (1983, 1995, 2003), he began advocating for the principles of “bottom-up” participatory planning and the role of communications therein.
As far back as 1976, Rogers suggested that the passing of the “dominant paradigm” of top-down planning would signal a shift toward a form of support that engaged the local population in the planning, implementation and execution of development. The role of communication in this process would be “1) providing technical information about development problems and possibilities, and about appropriate innovations in answer to local requests, and 2) circulating information about the self-development accomplishments of local groups so that other such groups might profit from others' experience” (Rogers, 1976, p.141).
In the fifth edition of Diffusion of Innovations , Rogers (2003, p. 376) acknowledged that a development project's degree of sustainability is determined in large measure by the extent of buy-in by the local population, and that buy-in is determined for the most part by the extent of participation involved. “Unless an innovation is highly compatible with clients' needs and resources,” he writes, “and unless clients feel so involved with the innovation that they regard it as ‘theirs,' it will not be continued over the long term.”
In further clarifying the role of diffusion in participatory planning, Rogers differentiates between “centralized” and “decentralized” diffusion systems. Decentralized diffusion systems are those in which innovations originate from local sources and then evolve as they diffuse via horizontal networks. “Instead of coming out of formal R&D networks,” he writes, “innovations often bubble up from the operational levels of a system, with the inventing done by certain lead users” (2003, p. 375).
The middle road to the tipping point
The thinking advanced by the Latin American critics and those that followed defined development as a widely participatory process of social change that is intended to bring about both social and material advancement for the majority of people through their gaining greater control over their environment (Singhal & Rogers, 2001). In the decades that followed this call for more popular participation in development communication, a wide range of theoretical responses emerged. At one end of the spectrum, scholars from the “modernistic”, diffusion invisible colleges 1 began to incorporate participatory dimensions into their research. At the other end, scholars critical of traditional development communication embraced participatory development as a utopian panacea. In other words, participation was conceptualized either as a means to an end, or as an end in and of itself (Huesca, 2002).
Some scholars from the “participation as an end” group, with an orientation rooted deeply in studying class conflict, saw any attempt to merge the two approaches as passive collaboration, or manipulative consultation done only to help advance a predetermined objective ( Dudley , 1993). White (1999) argued that any use of participation by those espousing diffusion will evolve into an “insidious domination tactic” if incorporated into the dominant development discourse, due to its historical association with “Western political hegemony.”
Not everyone agreed with this resistance to the harmonization of approaches. Einsiedel (2000) notes that the participatory approach is particularly important when questions on development issues are much more complex and with greater historical specificities than that addressed by Lasswell's (1964) linear questioning of who says what to whom with what effects. “We might ask whose voices are heard, what values are articulated, what representations are foregrounded, or what discursive practices are framed,” she says. However, she speculates there may sometimes be a need for both approaches. The most viable solutions to the world's development challenges may indeed come from “viewing boundaries not as impermeable walls, but as sites for exchange and developing the vigour that can arise from hybridity.” This approach to research, she says, pursues multiple approaches to development, using each approach to both inform and critique the others, questioning what they derive from each other, and respecting the differences between perspectives.
An example of this syncretic approach to development communication is found in more recent editions of Rogers ' classic, Diffusion of Innovations . While earlier editions of Rogers ' work emphasized the top-down diffusion of technology (1962, 1971), in later editions (1995, 2003), he began advocating for the principles of participatory planning and the role of communications therein. Though Rogers' work on diffusion theories has influenced numerous business and marketing texts from Wall Street to Madison Avenue (i.e. Gladwell, 2000; Moore, 1991), his insights are perhaps most relevant to development communications.
Rogers argues that both approaches are necessary. He maintains that mass media diffusion and ready access to information are needed to raise awareness of an issue, while participatory communication is needed to mobilize action towards a development objective, be it HIV prevention or community participation in local government. A combination of the two can lead to what Rogers calls the “critical mass” in the diffusion of an innovation or to what Malcolm Galdwell (2000) refers to as the “tipping point”: when a small change, such as a few more individuals practicing safe sex to avoid HIV transmission, triggers a big change in the rate of adoption.
Cecilia Cabañero-Verzosa, a senior communications officer at the World Bank and author of Strategic Communication for Development Projects (2003) believes that all development projects are essentially about behavioural change. She also believes in an approach that incorporates both dominant development communication paradigms. She says that in order for a communication strategy to take an empowering approach, one should look not only at employing top-down methods such as mass media through newspaper or television, but also bottom-up or interactive methods such as town hall meetings. Both media plans and interpersonal communications should play a complementary role in the process. Cabañero-Verzosa refers to this as a “dialogical process” which implies integrating upstream and downstream communications. This bi-directional communication is exemplified in Figure 2, which presents a concept map of the three dominant paradigms and how each relates to the stakeholders they are designed to engage and support.
Figure 2: Concept map of directions of communication among stakeholders in different approaches to devcom
