Document(s) 3 of 8

The researcher or
development practitioner as
a communication actor

Introduction

The purpose of this first part is to introduce the principal concepts associated with participatory development communication. Specifically, it should assist you to:

1. Reflect on your role as a researcher or development practitioner interacting with local communities.
2. Identify the potential and limitations of participatory development communication for facilitating participation in research and development.
3. Identify the various dimensions involved in using participatory development communication with communities and other stakeholders.

The researcher and the development practitioner as a communication actor

Communication is an essential part of participatory research and development. As the researcher working with a community or as a development practitioner, you are first of all a communication actor. The way you approach a local community, the attitude you adopt in interacting with community members, the way you understand and discuss issues, the way you collect and share information, all involve ways of establishing communication with people.

The way communication is established and nurtured will affect how involved people will feel about the issues raised and how they will participate – or not – in a research or development initiative.

Effective communication is two-way communication; it should not be a one-way dissemination of information, nor should it consist of telling people what they should or should not do. It should not be viewed as a way to motivate people to participate in activities in which they did not have an input. The role of the researcher or development practitioner interacting with a community should consist of establishing a dialogue with community members on development issues related to its mandate, and in facilitating this dialogue between community groups.

Participatory development communication

For many people, the term "communication" still suggests the use of the media, i.e. information dissemination activities by which printed materials, radio or television programs, educational video, etc., are used to send messages. Researchers and practitioners are often less familiar with the use of communication as an empowerment tool.

Here, when we use the terminology participatory development communication, we refer to the use of communication to facilitate community participation in a development initiative. We can define it in the following way:

Participatory development communication is a planned activity, based on the one hand on participatory processes, and on the other hand on media and interpersonal communication, which facilitates a dialogue among different stakeholders, around a common development problem or goal, with the objective of developing and implementing a set of activities to contribute to its solution, or its realization, and which supports and accompanies this initiative.

By stakeholders, we mean community members, active community groups, local and regional authorities, NGOs, government technical services or other institutions working at the community level, policy makers who are or should be involved with a given development initiative.

This kind of communication means moving from a focus of informing and persuading people to change their behavior or attitudes, to a focus on facilitating exchanges between different stakeholders to address a common problem. This could lead to a common development initiative to experiment with possible solutions and to identify what is needed to support the initiative in terms of partnerships, knowledge and material conditions.

The same process can be adopted when the point of departure is not a development problem but a common goal set at the community level. These exchanges also serve to articulate that goal, to lead to a set of activities to realize it and to identify what is needed in terms of partnership, knowledge, and material conditions.

The researcher and development practitioner as a facilitator

In either case, the researcher or the development practitioner uses communication as a tool to facilitate participation.

Often researchers and practitioners will adopt a vertical approach: they will identify a problem in a given community and experiment solutions with the collaboration of local people. On the communication side, the trend is to inform people of the many dimensions of that problem and of the solution they should implement and to mobilize them into action. But this way of working has little impact. After the completion of the research or the development project, things tend to return to the usual.

This reflects the old paradigm of research for development, in which the researcher applies her knowledge to the resolution of a problem, with the collaboration of a local community, and publishes her results. In the new paradigm, the researcher or development practitioner comes in as a facilitator of a process, which involves local communities and other stakeholders in the resolution of a problem or the realization of a common goal.

This requires a change of attitude. The researcher must perceive the communities not as beneficiaries but as stakeholders. You must also be ready to develop partnerships and synergy with other development actors working with the same communities.

Acting like a facilitator does not come automatically. One must learn to listen to people, to help them express their views and to assist in building consensus for action. For many researchers and development practitioners, this is a new role for which they may not have been prepared. It is a new way of doing research and development.

Making participatory research and development more effective

Participatory development communication offers another way of doing research and development projects with communities. Its methodology can be described around three sets of events:

The first set of events involves approaching a local community by: 

• Establishing contact with a local community;
• Understanding the local setting.

The second set of events involves the community and other stakeholders in planning a development research or initiative. It involves bringing people to: 

• Identify a given development problem or a common goal;
• Discover its many dimensions and potential solutions (in the case of a problem) or prerequisites (in the case of a goal);
• Decide on a set of actions they want to experiment with or implement;
• Identify the necessary conditions in terms of knowledge, partnership and material conditions.

That set of actions should coincide with the objectives of the research or the development project. Ideally, those should be identified at that moment. In practice, they are often identified a long time before because of the constraints of the research proposal or project presentation. When this is the case, one way to do it is to include in the proposal the review and finalization of the objectives and activities by the community as a first set of activities. 

The third set of events consists of developing a communication strategy. It involves the following: 

• Preparing and implementing a communication plan to support the set of actions identified by the stakeholders;
• Facilitating the building of partnerships;
• Facilitating the acquisition of knowledge necessary to implement these activities;
• Planning the sharing and utilization of results.

However, it is important to realize that if there is no guarantee that the necessary material conditions can be acquired, communication alone cannot be of great help.

Researchers and development practitioners involved in participatory research, where environmental and NRM problems are defined with the community, are already practicing the first steps presented here and should find it easy to integrate the other subsequent steps of PDC.

On the other hand, people involved in research or other development activities, where the problem has already been identified and the research or project design already produced, will probably find it more difficult unless they return to the community and open discussion on the a priori of the research or project.

In that kind of situation, PDC approaches will help you as researchers and practitioners to link more closely the research or project by involving the different stakeholders, thus ensuring more developmental impact.

Where does it come from?

Participatory development communication can be seen as a child of development communication and Participatory Research.

Although the term "development communication" is sometimes used to indicate the overall contribution of communication to the development of society, or sometimes to indicate the use of mass media to discuss development themes, it generally refers to the planned use of strategies and processes of communication aimed at achieving development.

It must be said that development communication is not a homogeneous field but rather a broad area in which one finds many approaches and various schools of thought and ideologies. Adult Education, Extension, IEC (information, education, communication), Advocacy, Enter-Educate (the use of entertainment to educate), and Social Marketing are some of the main approaches we find in the field.

Depending on the different methodological approaches, the definition of what development communication is will vary. However, beyond the differences in ideologies and methodological approaches, we may underscore that the lessons learned from experience in this field have demonstrated the importance of emphasizing interactive and participatory processes, rather than the production and dissemination of information apart from community processes.

The concept of development communication arose within the framework of the contribution that communication and the media made to development in the countries of the Third World. In the 1950s and 1960s, many donor agencies, such as UNESCO, USAID, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), sponsored numerous projects using media for communication, information or educational purposes, with a view to facilitate development, and subsequently promoted communication within the framework of development project implementation.

As for the expression "development communication," according to the Clearinghouse for Development Communication, it was apparently first used in the Philippines in the 1970s by Professor Nora Quebral to designate the processes for transmitting and communicating new knowledge related to rural environments. The field of knowledge was then extended to all those seeking to help improve the living conditions of the disadvantaged people. In the same period, Erskine Childers strongly promoted "Development Support Communication" in the UNDP system, insisting on the importance of having a communication component in all development projects.

Major trends in development communication

The experience of the past fifty years has demonstrated the crucial importance of communication in the field of development. Within this perspective of development communication, two trends developed successively: an approach that favoured large-scale actions and relied on the mass media, and an approach that promoted grassroots communication (also called community communication) via small-scale projects and use of small media (videos, posters, slide presentation, etc.).

These trends, which still co-exist today to various degrees within the field of development communication, are linked to the evolution of the development and communication models that have marked development efforts up to now. (We present those trends and the evolution in development communication in the Annex.)

The limits of participatory development communication

Because they provide support for local development initiatives, these communication activities have a direct impact on community participation in local development. Even where communication activities are relatively weak, we often find that they are useful to rally local energies around a development problem and its solutions.

Regardless of how they are conducted or what their results may be, these development communication activities encourage people to believe that their development problems are not insurmountable and that, rather than being passive onlookers, they can take action on their own.

Yet communication is not enough by itself. The development efforts that it supports also need financial and material resources and, in many cases, a degree of political will. Again, where the situation is appropriate, communication may be intended to bring together all these conditions and place them at the service of an identified development activity. Where the concrete means of implementation are lacking, or where it is not clear that they will be available, it is important to recognize that communication alone is not enough to achieve the development objectives identified.

Similarly, communication is not the answer to every development problem. There are some problems, or aspects of problems, that communication can help resolve promptly; for others, it can contribute over the longer term; while for still others it will be of little use.

Finally, participation is not a panacea or a magic wand. It is not easy to achieve and does not bring miracle results. It takes a lot of time and involvement. It can also generate frustration. Sometimes it may not be possible to achieve it. So one must be aware of those limitations, knowing at the same time that sustainable development cannot happen without it.

Implementing a participatory view of development

The first models of development were mostly defined by economic variables. It was thought that wealth, once acquired, would automatically enhance a society’s well-being and living standards. At the same time, communication was considered as a process for disseminating information. For example, in the field of natural resource management, the emphasis was put on the delivery of technical packages, which were meant to provide the information and solutions people needed to address their problems.

These practices did not achieve much impact. Since then, models of development and communication have evolved considerably. We have learned to think of development as a global process, for which societies are responsible. It is not something that can be brought in from outside. Each society must define its own model of development in the light of its specific context, its culture, its resources and its values. The same is true for the various groups within a given community. People must play an active part in the process. Regarding communication, this vision of development implies that the emphasis should be put on facilitating participation.

We have also learned that development is not merely a question of economics or material goods: it also involves the notions of freedom, equitable income distribution, political openness, access to education, etc.

Participation is central to the task of defining and achieving development. But in spite of this evolution in our understanding of development, some researchers and development practitioners continue to work in a “top-down” approach. In such an approach, they are the ones who select a development problem to be tackled, identify potential solutions and develop an experimentation or implementation plan. They lead the entire process. The practice of participatory development communication should help them associate the different stakeholders in that exercise.

A further lesson is that there are limits to the ability of communication in facilitating development. First, any action is inherently limited in scope: a single series of communication activities will not change local attitudes, end desertification or invent agrarian reform overnight.

There are also limitations in terms of abilities and capacities. There are some things that communities can do by themselves, with their own resources. Then there are cases where other people must be involved, or where there are certain conditions that must be assembled. Finally, there are issues that cannot be resolved by local communities alone (e.g. policies and laws) and where they must involve other stakeholders and plan for the long term. Development practitioners and researchers must therefore help local people set realistic objectives and time frames for their action.

Development is generally not visible immediately. Yet the first step on the road to development is clear to all: it is the people’s conviction that they can change things for the better, their refusal to be the permanent victims of any situation, and the emergence of a sense of self-confidence.

Development can also be characterized by the process that is implemented to attain it: strengthening a community’s capacity to undertake initiatives to resolve concrete natural resource management problems, identifying and analyzing these problems, and deciding and implementing appropriate solutions. Undertaking these steps in the name of communities, but without their participation, does not lead to much impact.

Development is no longer considered as a process being directed toward beneficiaries, but as a result of the involvement and effort of people. Participation is an essential condition to this task and communication is the process that facilitates it.

Community participation

Should we continue to speak of "participation"? It has been the central development concept of the last decades and nearly everyone refers to it. Yet, in practice, it covers many "non-participatory" approaches.

For example, we cannot really refer to a participatory approach when researchers and development practitioners use participatory techniques in a context where they have already decided on the issue and where they use the information generated for the purposes of the research or development project itself, rather than for the purposes of a community-owned initiative.

The concept of "participation" is used in many ways and covers practices of all kinds. Sometimes it is used as a legitimization of non-participatory approaches. In some cases, people will say "it is participatory because we did PRA (participatory rural appraisal) with the community" when in fact they utilized a technique without an understanding of the underlying fundamentals. In fact, such techniques should help build a process where community members take ownership of a development initiative.

Participation is not limited to the notion of "consultation." In development, communities must be involved in identifying their own development problems, in seeking solutions, and in taking decisions about how to implement them. If there is some generation of information, it should be conducted in order to help the community understand and act upon the debated issues, not as an "extractive process," as has generally been the case with traditional research.

Participation does not equate mobilization either. The concept goes well beyond enlisting community support for a development project defined by authorities, NGOs or experts. This cannot lead to the expected results in a sustainable way because decisions are taken outside the community.

So what is "participation" all about? We may say that a good indicator of participation is when people take responsibility for carrying out a development initiative. This means that people are not only taking part in the different activities, but also in the decision-making process and the planning of the development initiative.

A community meeting in the Sahel. Is it consultation, mobilization or participation? True participation is not only people getting together. They must be able to contribute to a decision-making process.

To facilitate participation, research teams and development practitioners must consider the people they want to communicate with as partners in a development effort, and not merely as beneficiaries. The corollary on the communication side is that efforts must be made to bring people into the discussion on the development problem or the goal to be addressed and the actions to be undertaken.

The concept of participation also involves that of "community." If the goal is to facilitate participation, we must not forget that a local community is not a unified group of people, but rather a grouping of individuals and groups with their own characteristics and their own interests. It often happens that decisions taken in the name of the community in fact reflect the interests of one group or another. At this point, communication becomes a guise for manipulation. It is important then, to identify clearly the different community groups that are affected by a common development problem and who are willing and able to deal with it, and to ensure that each group can express its own viewpoint.

Participation also goes hand in hand with responsibility. It is useful here to distinguish the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders involved and to work out participants’ material or financial contribution to the process. This contribution can take many forms: services, materials, funding, etc. However small it may be, it will help participants feel a sense of ownership over the communication activity. Without ownership, the effort will always be seen as "someone else's" initiative.

Promoting participation also depends on making room for democracy and recognizing the right to express divergent opinions. Without democracy and respect for fundamental human rights, and without the freedom of expression, the ability to use communication to foster social change is severely limited. Democracy implies recognizing other peoples’ right to exist, to have their own points of view, and to express them freely, as long as they do so peacefully, without inciting hatred or bullying other people. When this ethos does not exist, participatory development communication cannot be of much help.

Obviously, recognizing the right to express divergent opinions can pose problems in many settings. Also, in many cultures, this runs counter to traditions that recognize the unarguable superiority of the Chief’s opinion, or that reserve decision-making powers for the community elders. In such a setting, how are women or young people to express themselves? How can we avoid violence in situations where viewpoints or actions run counter to the will of traditional or political authorities, or set different groups against each other?

In using communication, you must be aware of all these factors: you must understand what is legally and socially accepted and acceptable, and be ready to deal with situations where the freedom of expression is suppressed or severely constrained. Thus, when development actions involve changes in the law or in the way things are done, or imply confrontation between the priviledges assigned to different groups; the situation can become delicate indeed. In these situations, researchers and practitioners are ethically bound not to provoke conflicts by their own acts, for which the participants would end up paying the price.

Using communication to facilitate participation

We have discussed the need to go beyond transmitting messages or information and persuading people. The role of the researcher or development practitioner in using communication does not consist in transmitting or disseminating messages, but in facilitating participation in local development.

The success of communication activities is closely linked to the perception of the researcher or development practitioner’s role as facilitating that process of community participation. If you see your role as conceiving and disseminating messages, you will no longer be of help to community groups in identifying development problems and implementing action. Similarly, you must be careful not to substitute yourself, often unsuccessfully, for the competent local technical resources; instead you must facilitate their collaboration and participation in the development initiative identified.

As well, you must learn to involve community groups more closely in the communication strategy, and help them take ownership of the initiative rather than seeing themselves as beneficiaries of a research or development intervention.

To facilitate this participation, the researcher or development practitioner must be prepared to assume several different functions: 

• Facilitate dialogue and the exchange of ideas among different groups and specific individuals: this presupposes a sound understanding of the local setting.
• Encourage thinking about local development problems and possible solutions or about a common goal to achieve the desired results: this presupposes a thorough understanding of the subject, or enlisting people who have such an understanding.
• Support the identification and realization of a concrete set of actions for experimenting or implementing the solutions identified or for achieving an identified development goal: by facilitating the different groups involved in those actions to share their views.
• Support efforts at awareness-building, motivation, learning and implementing the development action: by using communication strategies appropriate to each group of participants.
• Ensure the effective circulation of information among different participants: by using communication tools and channels appropriate to the groups involved.
• Support decision-making: by facilitating consensus among different categories of players.
• Develop local collaboration and partnerships by establishing alliances with local resource persons and agencies and serving as a conduit between the groups and these partners.
• Monitor the development initiative: by ensuring that actions taken are followed and evaluated.
• Make sure that the authorities or resource agencies in a position to assist the development action are aware of local viewpoints and needs.

Implementing such a process demands many skills including the capacity to act at different levels. The following six areas are considered to be key skill areas for researchers and development practitioners.

Developing a two-way communication process

The researcher or development practitioner must first learn to establish a dialogue with a community. You should be able to bring people to express their points of view and listen to others, and to build consensus around a course of action. This demands the ability to listen, to be aware of the participants’ viewpoints and to be in a position to bring them to share information and views.

At the local level, in many people’s minds, researchers and development practitioners are considered as a type of authority: therefore they are expected to speak and community members, with the exception of local authorities, are not used to taking part in such exchanges. This new role requires a change of attitudes.

Researchers and development practitioners should not act like schoolteachers insisting on a quiet and attentive class. Nor should they try to mobilize people in support of actions that they neither choose nor desire. Their role should be to develop a two-way communication process.

Planning and developing a communication strategy

Facilitating learning

Where the goal of the research or the development action involves acquiring knowledge and developing skills or know-how that will allow participants to implement a development initiative of their own choosing, communication must also facilitate the learning process.

Adult education has demonstrated that people learn better through a non-directive teaching approach, where learning is active and takes their experience into account, as well as their knowledge and their way of seeing the world. Accordingly, you should act as facilitators of that process. It can be difficult to follow this approach if you have not been trained accordingly. At this point, research teams or practitioners may want to enlist the collaboration of a resource person who has these capacities and who can help facilitate learning and knowledge acquisition.

Moderating discussions

As a communication facilitator, you are also a moderator: you must listen to the various viewpoints expressed, create opportunities for interchange, encourage participants to state their views, resolve conflicts, and be judicious in the use of time available, while keeping the discussion on track.

Discussion and exchange of viewpoints should lead to decisions about how to implement the solution selected. You must therefore be able to sum up the debate, introduce a decision-making process, and facilitate consensus. This is not always easy: it may sometimes be necessary to expose

attempts by an individual or an interest group to manipulate the decision. Since not everyone is equally endowed with such skills, it may be best in some situations to look for a moderator within the local community or to associate such a person in the research team.

Formatting and shaping information

Another function consists of making information accessible, in a form consistent with the characteristics of the participants in the communication process. Information on desertification prevention, for example, will not necessarily have the same meaning for nurses, peasants, soldiers, traders and youngsters. A new farming technique will not be viewed or understood in the same way by a poor, illiterate peasant and by a prosperous, educated farmer.

Encouraging and organizing women participation

Finally, it is important that women be encouraged to serve as communication facilitators. In many countries, where the agents employed by development organizations and technical extension services, or the members of research teams are mainly men, a real effort is needed to recruit female communication facilitators to take part in activities.

It will often be found that women alone are able to communicate truly with other women about their needs and to help them channel their efforts to bring about change. Indeed, in most settings, only women can approach other women, encourage them to speak their minds, and assist them in the process of individual or social change.

Participatory research and participatory development communication

Participatory development communication supports a participatory development or research for development process. It is about facilitating community participation through a strategic utilization of communication. As such, it brings together the approaches and techniques of participatory research and development with those of development communication. This implies a few important characteristics as follows:

First, within this framework, researchers, practitioners and community members learn together through joint action and reflection. It is important to state that there is no single, all-purpose recipe. Each time we must look for the best way to establish and nurture the kind of communication that will encourage and foster participation in a concrete initiative for change and support the sharing and utilization of learning.

This also means that we are allowed to make mistakes and that we learn from analyzing our successes and our failures. This is why it is important to check regularly to see that what we are doing is producing the desired results, and ask if it would be better to alter course along the way. Thus, instead of following a rigid, predetermined plan, we must be able to readjust our aim as we go along and learn from practical field experience.

Researchers and development practitioners, as well as community members and other stakeholders who are involved in the process should also be engaged in continuous monitoring and evaluation, in order to draw conclusions, apply them in practice, and then question them again. This is a continual cycle of action and reflection, through which everyone learns and improves upon their efforts.

In this first part we already mentioned some of the prerequisites that ideally should be present within communities and among practitioners. We also mentioned the need for an environment permissive of this kind of participatory approach, including democracy and the right to express divergent opinions. But it is also important to add that participation takes time: it has to become part of a culture. It is not that researchers or practitioners who approach the communities with such a framework will automatically enable participation to take place and lead to empowerment. Participation has to be learned by everyone.

Furthermore, in communities where there has been no tradition of free speech, or where there has been negative experiences resulting from free speech (political repression for example), or where there has been a history of conflicts (war or violent conflicts outside or within the community), participation will take a long time to evolve. At the same time, it is the only road that may lead to development.

Document(s) 3 of 8