How ‘sustainable’ is development communication research?

Abstract

This article argues that a focus on sustainability will allow us to engage the complexity that communication research for development and social change routinely encounters. We start with a brief historical overview, move to the need for sustainability as an organizing principle, then to a consideration of some theoretical and methodological approaches to sustainability, and finally to conclusions concerning the state of the field.

Keywords

Communication for social change development communication impact of communication research participatory communication sustainability

In considering the course of development communication research through social change and the (r)evolution in development thinking, most historical accounts (Manyozo, 2012; McAnany, 2012; Melkote and Steeves, 2001; Servaes, 1999, 2012; Servaes and Malikhao, 2014; Sparks, 2007; Waisbord, 2001; Wilkins et al., 2014) identify three paradigmatic approaches—the modernization paradigm, the dependency paradigm, and the multiplicity paradigm—and position two ideal-typical communication models on a continuum—top-down diffusion versus bottom-up participation. For my part (Servaes, 1999, 2008), I have tried to summarize (or, perhaps, just add to) this complexity by (1) identifying the different theoretical positions in (1a) development and in (1b) communication, (2) looking at the research priorities in different time periods, (3) considering the resulting policy recommendations, and (4) by examining the applications that might have occurred.

Building on this foundation, this article suggests a redirection of interests from atomistic approaches that might emphasize individual project or campaign outcomes to the more systems-based view of the sustainability of social change. I will argue that a focus on sustainability will allow us to engage the complexity that communication research for development and social change routinely encounters. I start with a brief historical overview, move to the need for sustainability as an organizing principle, then to a consideration of some theoretical and methodological approaches to sustainability, and finally to conclusions concerning the state of the field.

Research trends come and go, and come again

Development communication in the 1958–1986 period was generally greeted with enthusiasm and optimism. From meta-analytical exercises by Fair (1988, 1989) we learned that models predicting either powerful effects or limited effects informed the research. Three directions for future research were suggested: (a) to examine the relevance of message content, (b) to conduct more comparative research, and (c) to conduct more policy research.

And indeed, the findings between 1987 and 1996 show a different picture (Fair and Shah, 1997; Rogers and Hart, 2002). In the 1987–1996 study, the most frequent suggestion was the need to conduct more policy research. This was followed by the need to research and develop indigenous models of communication and development through participatory research (Fair and Shah, 1997: 19). Therefore, nobody was making the optimistic claims of the early years any longer. Both periods do make use of theories or approaches such as knowledge gap, indirect influence, and uses and gratifications. However, research appearing in the years from 1987 to 1996 can be characterized as much more theoretically diverse than that published between 1958 and 1986.

Some of the findings during the latest period researched (between 1997 and 2007) are noteworthy as well. They partly confirm what changed in previous periods. However, some ‘old’ trends re-emerged as well (Ogan et al., 2009; Shah, 2007, 2010):

Most authors work at Western institutions (mainly North America, then Western Europe), rather than in the non-Western world, although the majority of authors actually come from developing countries.

Surveys, secondary data analysis, content analysis, and meta-research were the most popular quantitative methods used in 1997–2007; whereas on the qualitative side were interviews, case studies, observation, focus groups, and ethnography.

On the content side, the trend to conduct a-theoretical research in this field persists. Three-quarters of all the studies used no theory to define their work. In those studies which build on theories modernization theories remain dominant, followed by participatory development, dependency, and feminist development. Globalization did not feature prominently in most studies. Lerner’s model of media and development has reappeared in the 1997–2005 time period after totally disappearing in the 1987–1996 period. Only two other theories from the traditional US-based behavioral science approach, social learning theory and knowledge gap, appear in the 1997–2005 period. Shah (2007) explains the persistence of ‘old’ ideas from a technological deterministic perspective: ‘Each new technological innovation in the postcolonial world since 1958—television, satellites, microwave, computers, call centers, wireless technology—has been accompanied by determined hope that Lerner’s modernization model will increase growth and productivity and produce modern cosmopolitan citizens’ (Shah, 2007: 24). This point is echoed by Ogan et al. (2009) who conclude that studies have moved away from mass communication and toward information and communication technologies’ (ICT) role in development, that they infrequently address development in the context of globalization and often continue to embrace a modernization paradigm despite its many criticisms.

The consequences of development communication are very much associated with the more traditional views on modernization; that is, media activate modernity, and media raise knowledge levels. This more traditional perspective makes a strong return, as it was less pronounced during the 1987–1996 timeframe. The three other consequences listed are more critical to modernization: media create participatory society, media benefit certain classes, and media create development problems.

The optimistic belief that there are overall positive impacts of development communication on individuals, dominant in 1958–1986, has consistently dropped. Increasingly, however, it is pointed out that more attention needs to be paid to theory and research.

The findings by Fair, Ogan, Shah and others (see also Servaes, 2012) present us with a clear but at the same time complex picture of the CDSC field. The implicit assumptions on which the so-called dominant modernization paradigm is built do still linger on and continue to influence the policy and planning-making discourse of major actors in the field of CDSC, both at theoretical and applied levels.

The underlying assumption is one of technological determinism (Servaes, 2014). It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see this confirmed in public opinion surveys. A recent Pew Research survey (Smith, 2014) on US Views of Technology and the Future finds that most Americans (59%) believe that the technological developments of the coming half-century will have a net positive impact on society. However, 39% think these changes will lead to a future in which people are worse off than they are today. As Smith (2014: 5–6), the author of the report, summarizes: ‘They are especially concerned about developments that have the potential to upend long-standing social norms around things like personal privacy, surveillance, and the nature of social relationships’.

The sustainability of social change processes

In Servaes (2008, 2013) I subdivided communication strategies for development and social change at five levels: (a) Behavior change communication (BCC) (mainly interpersonal communication), (b) Mass communication (MC) (community media, mass media, and ICTs), (c) Advocacy communication (AC) (interpersonal and/or mass communication), (d) Participatory communication (PC) (interpersonal communication and community media), and (e) Communication for structural and sustainable social change (CSSC) (interpersonal communication, participatory communication, mass communication, and ICTs).

Interpersonal communication and mass communication form the bulk of what is being studied in the mainstream discipline of communication science. BCC is mainly concerned with short-term individual changes in attitudes and behavior, mainly adopted from social-psychology. It can be further subdivided in perspectives that explain individual behavior, interpersonal behavior, and community or societal behavior.

In other publications (see references) I presented and developed arguments that claim that BCC, MC, and AC, though useful by themselves, will not being able to create sustainable change. PC and CSSC are more concerned about long-term sustained change at different levels of society, and therefore more interested in sustainability and lasting impact.

In other words, the first three approaches are in isolation not capable of creating sustainable development. Sustainable social change can only be achieved in combination with and incorporating aspects of the wider environment that influences (and constrains) structural and sustainable change. These aspects include: structural and conjunctural factors (e.g., history, migration, conflicts), policy and legislation, service provision, education systems, institutional and organizational factors (e.g., bureaucracy, corruption), cultural factors (e.g., religion, norms, and values), sociodemographic factors (e.g., ethnicity, class), sociopolitical factors, socioeconomic factors, and the physical environment.

The gap between theory and practice, between academics and their ‘field’

In a recent attempt to critically review the many challenges and issues associated with developing and implementing indicators of CDSC impacts, Lennie and Tacchi (2013) once again confirm the substantial gap between the theory and practice of CDSC:

The evaluation of Communication for Development (C4D) needs to be based on an appropriate combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques, complementary approaches and triangulation, and recognition that different approaches are suitable for different issues and purposes. However, there is often a lack of appreciation, funding and support for alternative, innovative Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RME) approaches among management and mainstream M&E specialists in the UN. Commitment to participatory processes is often rhetoric rather than meaningful or appropriate practice. Funders tend to place greater value on narrow, quantitative measurement-oriented approaches and indicators that do not sufficiently take the complexity of culture and the context of C4D and development initiatives into account (Lennie and Tacchi, 2013: 4).

In other words, since the so-called ‘top-down’ approaches have fallen out of grace in the highly political development aid community, many statements and reports are now advocating ‘bottom-up’ approaches with references to participation, empowerment and providing ‘a voice for the voiceless’. As most often no proper ontological or epistemological assumptions are considered, many approaches contain references to both diffusionist and participatory perspectives in obvious contradictory and illogical ways. Rogers (2005a, 2005b), from the UN Development Group in Geneva, summarizes it as ‘Participatory diffusion or semantic confusion.’

Hardly anybody seems to be concerned about the implicit contradictions these forms of ‘hybridity’ pose at both theoretical and applied levels. For instance, The Rome Consensus agreed at the first ever World Congress on Communication for Development (Rome, October 2006) states that

Communication for Development is a social process based on dialogue using a broad range of tools and methods. It is also about seeking change at different levels including listening, building trust, sharing knowledge and skills, building policies, debating and learning for sustained and meaningful change. It is not public relations or corporate communication (emphasis added) (http://www.devcomm-congress.org/worldbank/macro/2.asp).

However, major aspects of many projects and programmes currently being researched, promoted and implemented, in both the ‘academic’ community as well as in the ‘professional field’, are nothing but ‘public relations or corporate communication’ wrapped in participatory diffusion rhetoric. (More details in Dervin and Huesca, 1999; Huesca, 2008; Puddephatt et al. 2009; Servaes, 2013; Servaes et al., 2012; or see Morris, 2003 who did a comparative analysis of the diffusion models and participatory models in development communication).

On the one hand, while decision- and policymakers are increasingly ‘charmed’ by participatory and bottom-up approaches, they nonetheless continue to believe that vertical, top-down planning, mainly based on the use of (old and new) media, remains a more effective way to ‘deliver’ social change (as further argued in Servaes, 2007). They often use the lack of ‘empirical evidence’ (read: quantitative data) as an ‘excuse’ for their lack of support, while conveniently ignoring some of the findings and recommendations published in-house.

For instance, a comprehensive assessment commissioned and published by the World Bank (Inagaki, 2007: 34–35) warns ‘against making generalizations about the effectiveness of a given approach or channel, and call the attentions of communication specialists and researchers to contextual factors’ (Inagaki, 2007: 34–35). Inagaki also points at a number of blind spots in the recent empirical literature. The ‘most invisible … is the effort to understand the long-term effects of communication’ (Inagaki, 2007: 54). Also the sustainability of communication impacts is questionable, because ‘project implementation schedules are too short if one tries to gauge long-term impacts during or within the timeframe of the projects … (and) many of the researchers authoring academic evaluations also play the role of communication consultants within the projects they subsequently evaluate’ (Inagaki, 2007).

On the other hand, it is no longer true—as the popular saying often goes that ‘academics are 10 years ahead of us’ (see Lennie and Tacchi, 2013: 5)—that the knowledge gap is only discernable at the side of ‘practitioners’.

For instance, in the discussion on the digital divide, while critique among ‘academics’ has targeted on the simplistic conflation of access with participation in digital divide discourses, development organizations and industries seem to be moving away from these discourses altogether. The 2012 UNDP’s report ‘Mobile technologies and empowerment’ relinquishes the digital divide problematic. Partly, this has to do with their claim that technology diffusion, speared by the mobile phone, has reached the world’s poorest populations, supposedly creating more cross-country convergences than divides in ‘a new wave of democratization of access to innovative information and communication channels, propelled by state-of-the-art technologies and diminishing barriers to entry’. But more strikingly, the report critiques the technological determinist assumption that access equals participation and social change. The report claims that ‘alone, mobile phones will neither pull people out of poverty, nor propel democratic governance. They must be part and parcel of broader development agendas’.

Therefore, in Servaes (2014) I aim to point to some shifts and emerging tendencies in conceptions of technology, agency, and change. Such changes might require a shift in critical thinking and urge us to reconsider or repurpose the critique of technological determinism. I draw attention to the ways in which skill, capabilities, and heterogeneous cultural resources are simultaneously stimulated, channeled, exploited, and repressed. We further need to integrate such a political account of skill with the concepts of voice and political efficacy, the need for a digital (visual) literacy, and need for new more participatory measurements and methods to assess their (short and/or longer term) impact.

Approaching complexity through sustainability?

Lennie and Tacchi (2013) claim that standard indicators (which are widely applied by both academics and policymakers) are unable to capture complex realities and relationships: ‘They can be useful ways of measuring change but not of capturing the reasons behind social change. … While quantitative indicators are emphasized in mainstream ME approaches, for C4D they often need to be qualitative to be most effective and appropriate. An alternative systems approach requires indicators that are flexible and encompass complexity, or, the use of alternatives to indicators such as stories of significant change and “verifying assumptions”’ (Lennie and Tacchi, 2013: 7).

Hence, I, together with my graduate students at UMass, have introduced another way of assessing the impact of communication by using ‘sustainability’ as the main focus of analysis, where sustainability is defined as a continuing capacity to promote social change. As part of an ongoing research project (Servaes, 2013; Servaes et al., 2012) we have developed a framework for the assessment of sustainability. Based on a review of the literature, our indicators were designed for four sectors of development or social change: Health, Education, Environment and Governance. We selected eight indicators for each of the sectors of development: actors (the people involved in the project, which may include opinion leaders, community activists, tribal elders, youth, etc.), factors (structural and conjunctural), level (local, state, regional, national, international, global), development communication approach (behavioral change, mass communication, advocacy, participatory communication, or communication for sustainable social change—which is likely a mix of all of the above), channels (radio, ICT, TV, print, internet, etc.), message (the content of the project, campaign), process (diffusion-centered, one-way, information-persuasion strategies, or interactive and dialogical), and method (quantitative, qualitative, participatory, or in combination).

For each indicator we developed a set of questions designed to specifically measure the sustainability of the project. We defined ‘sustainability’ for example, by analyzing whether the channels are compatible with both the capacity of the actors and the structural and conjunctural factors? If they are, the project will have a higher likelihood of being sustainable in the long run. We asked to what extent was the process participatory and consistent with the cultural values of the community? Was the message developed by local actors in the community and how was it understood? Our research shows, the more local and interactive the participation—in levels, communication approaches, channels, processes, and methods—the more sustainable the project will be.

Conclusion

We have come a long way in mainstreaming Communication for Development and Social Change. The field has nurtured its own disciplinary groundings and thematic embeddings, has become more or less coherent, is recognized and acknowledged within the wider community of scholars and professionals, and is establishing its own historical roots in theory and practice. The field remains dynamic and has not settled down in a static way, but on a solid ground it progresses and expands in critical and creative ways.

However, we also need to acknowledge that there is still a long way ahead of us. The foci and debates in the field have shifted and broadened. In its drive for relevance and impact, issues related to complexity, hybridity of cultures, (post)modernity, multiculturalism, sustainability, transdisciplinarity, leadership, learning, and participation are being re-assessed instead of their previous concern with ‘modernization,’ ‘synchronization,’ and ‘cultural imperialism.’ With these ‘new’ discussions, the debates have also shifted from an emphasis on homogeneity towards an emphasis on differences. With this shift towards differences and localities there is also an increased interest in the link between the global and the local and in how the global is perceived in the local. In the current world state, globalization and localization are seen as interlinked processes and this marks a radical change in thinking about change and development. It could integrate macro- and micro-theory. Therefore, Thompson (1995) argues that the relation between structured patterns of global communication, on the one hand, and the local conditions under which media products are consumed, on the other hand, can best be understand as the axis of globalized diffusion and localized appropriation.

Human and environmental sustainability has become a central theme in development and social change activities. Sustainable interventions are necessary to ensure a world worth living in for future generations. Besides political-economic approaches, we need socio-cultural approaches to guarantee acceptable and integrated levels of sustainability and to build resilience. Moreover, it is essential to recognize that development problems are complex. Complex or so-called wicked problems, such as the existence of climate change, conflict and war, HIV/AIDS, and malaria, are problems that do not have one single solution that is right or wrong, good or bad, or true or false. These are problems in which many stakeholders are involved, all of them framing the problems and issues in a different way. Therefore, solutions need to be negotiated, for instance, in multi-stakeholder platforms.

In order to mainstream communication and strengthen theoretical development in the field, there is a need for sub-disciplines such as political communication and intercultural communication to engage more explicitly with Communication for Development and Social Change (further elaborated in Lie and Servaes, 2015). At the same time there is a need for transdisciplinarity. We need to re-think and re-order the relationships between communication academics, communication professionals (e.g., extension agents, health communication specialists, intermediaries, knowledge brokers, change agents, M&E specialists), technical field specific professionals (technical ICT specialists, agronomists, medical doctors), policy makers (international, national, intra-national), civil society members (e.g., NGOs, social movements, societal agents), and local people (e.g., farmers, fishermen, households, audiences, clients). Linkages and dialogues need improvement.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This statement is an abridged version of the keynote paper presented at the International Conference on ‘Comparative Communication Research: Reviews, Showcases, and Theoretical Advancements’, to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 6–7 February 2015.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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