Communication in International Development

Doing Good or Looking Good?

Florencia Enghel, Jessica Noske-Turner, Florencia Enghel, Jessica Noske-Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138569928
• eBook ISBN: 9781351336901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

International development stakeholders harness communication with two broad purposes: to do good, via communication for development and media assistance, and to communicate do-gooding, via public relations and information. This book unpacks various ways in which different efforts to do good are combined with attempts to look good, be it in the eyes of donor constituencies at large, or among more specific audiences, such as journalists or intra-agency decision-makers.

Development communication studies have tended to focus primarily on interventions aimed at doing good among recipients, at the expense of examining the extent to which promotion and reputation management are elements of those practices. This book establishes the importance of interrogating the tensions generated by overlapping uses of communication to do good and to look good within international development cooperation.

The book is a critical text for students and scholars in the areas of development communication and international development and will also appeal to practitioners working in international aid who are directly affected by the challenges of communicating for and about development.

Part I
“For” and “about”: Interrogating practices across domains

1
A “Success Story” Unpacked

Doing good and communicating do-gooding in the Videoletters Project

Florencia Enghel

Introduction

On 2 April 2005, Videoletters premiered in Sarajevo, the capital of BosniaHerzegovina. The event, organised to celebrate the project’s readiness for intervention in order to facilitate reconciliation across the former Yugoslavia, was at the same time a public relations move that brought together Videoletters’ proponents, its protagonists, representatives of its European funders, and Western journalists. Expectations were high. An article published by BBC News on 8 April 2005 quoted an executive from Bosnia-Herzegovina Television (BHT) present at the launch as saying: “I think it will have an impact in changing the way people think. They will think less about their country and more about relations between their friends” (Prodger 2005).

He was referring to the project’s centrepiece: a 12-episode documentary television series narrating stories of reencounter among people who had been separated by the violent breakup of the former Yugoslavia, but gotten in touch again thanks to video-mediated correspondence. The series was scheduled to be broadcast throughout the region, and the ambition was that it would move people in every successor state to overcome ethno-political divides. The broadcast was to be complemented by a dedicated Internet platform for do-it-yourself reconciliation, and a tour of the region to screen episodes of the series in public spaces and facilitate their discussion. In a nutshell, Videoletters would reconnect the Western Balkans.¹

The project was welcomed internationally: reported on by the press, spotlighted in documentary film festivals, and referred to in scholarly work and policy forums. This happened despite the fact that Videoletter’s promise to mediate reconciliation across the successor states was not fulfilled. Or in other words: although the project did a very limited amount of good, it nonetheless communicated do-gooding successfully. Based on a qualitative study of the project (Enghel 2014), in this chapter I consider overlaps, disconnects and tensions in the use of various forms of mediated of communication to do good and to make intervention look good in international development cooperation.

The double nature of development communication

International media assistance² to the Western Balkans took place alongside military intervention and peacekeeping/peacebuilding operations since the signature of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 and until 2006, when it was phased out (ICG 1997; Thompson and De Luce 2002; Kurspahic 2003; Allen and Stremlau 2005; Rhodes 2007). The Videoletters Project was a high-profile case of this assistance. Launched in 2005 with significant backing from the British and Dutch Ministries of Foreign Affairs, it soon became a flagship of the late stage of foreign intervention in the region. Its intention to mediate reconciliation was spotlighted by the press and brought up as exemplary in scholarly work, and the documentary series that was its centrepiece was praised in film festivals.

The project’s premises were that documentary-making could be a stepping stone to social change, and that a region-wide TV broadcast and an Internet-based platform could expand the speed and scope of the transformation sought. Videoletters’ explicit purpose was to promote reconciliation among ordinary citizens across the divided region. An implicit goal was to bring together the successor states’ national TV stations in support of this purpose, by inviting them to air the documentary series jointly. The project became known in Europe and the US on the grounds of its communicative power to do good, and thus registered as the product of a positive enterprise regardless of the fact that its promise to mediate large-scale reconciliation across the region’s ethno-political borders was not fulfilled.

Based on a multi-dimensional qualitative study of Videoletters’ overall trajectory between inception in 2000 and fast deployment in 2005 (Enghel 2014), in this chapter I outline how uses of mediated communication to do good and to convey do-gooding coexisted in a disjointed manner in the project. I analyse these combined uses from a justice perspective (Fraser 2008) and consider their relevance for future research of actually existing development communication. The analysis counterbalances deterministic accounts of the presumed power of mediated communication to do good – i.e. to mobilise action in order to solve pressing socio-political problems – and renders visible under-researched aspects of the communication of this particular type of do-gooding.

The Western Balkans will be reconciled

What was the history behind Videoletters’ premiere in Sarajevo on 2 April 2005? The project had started in 2000 as the independent initiative of two documentary filmmakers based in the Netherlands, premised on a seemingly simple idea. They would travel across the former Yugoslavia seeking people who had lost contact with a dear somebody (friend, relative, neighbor, or colleague) during the conflict, but were now willing to attempt reconnection. The filmmakers would then act as messengers, bringing video letters back and forth in order to facilitate the restart of conversations, and each case of correspondence would become an episode of a documentary series. It took them several years to secure funding in order to move from having facilitated a few video-based reconnections to producing an entire documentary series and arranging an ambitious intervention around it.

In 2004, three episodes of the series were screened as work in progress at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (from now on, IDFA),³ in the Netherlands. By then, Videoletters had grabbed the attention of the Dutch Foreign Ministry, which agreed to fund plans for its large scale roll-out. Attended by more than 2,000 people, IDFA exposed Videoletters to the documentary-making international community. Scholar Patricia Aufderheide (2005) highlighted the project in her account of the festival for Dox, a leading European documentary magazine supported by the European Union’s Culture Program, depicting it as the moving bearer of hope: “At the IDFA premiere, the representative of Bosnian public television tried to express his hope for the series, but was unable to speak through his shaking sobs” (Aufderheide 2005, 14–15).

The backing of the Dutch government, announced at IDFA, added to financial support granted by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2003. Both Ministries of Foreign Affairs had decided to support the project following the advice of the Media Task Force of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. The Task Force endorsed Videoletters⁴ as an instance of high quality television production of great importance in order to reach audiences across the former Yugoslavia (MTF 2004). At the Sarajevo premiere, the filmmakers also announced the launch of the project’s website, Videoletters.net,⁵ which was created to facilitate do-it-yourself Internet-based correspondence among audiences of the series. The broadcast was expected to move audiences to reconnect with each other, and the website would potentially channel this presupposed need to do so.

The Videoletters project in a nutshell

Videoletters was an intervention supported by two European bilateral donors in order to facilitate, render public and mobilise reconnection among estranged citizens of the Western Balkans through the strategic use of mediated communication. Described by its proponents as “a tool for reconciliation”,⁶ it was implemented between early April and late July 2005 and concentrated in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Enghel 2014).

The project combined elements of the practice of communication for development, documentary-making for social change and media assistance into a hybrid (González Cahuapé-Casaux and Kalatil 2015). The idea, in short, was that a documentary series appealing to the human connection, televised jointly by the state broadcasters of former enemies, would attract a large audience, and move it – emotionally and in terms of action – towards reconciliation. Television was considered a powerful avenue for communicating with the citizens of the successor states, who were understood as being “ready for peace”. The Internet was seen to have the potential to coordinate a myriad of individual intentions to reconnect.

The intervention was funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which outsourced reconciliation to the filmmakers. The FCO provided EUR 180,000 through its Global Conflict Prevention Pool’s Balkan Strategy and its Belgrade British Embassy (FCO 2013), and the Dutch MFA provided EUR 1,14 million through its Western Balkans Division (Ministerie van BuitenlandseZaken 2011). In both cases, funds were earmarked not only for doing good, but also for communicating do-gooding⁷ (FCO 2013; Interviews D and O in Enghel 2014). Following contractual arrangements with the respective government agencies, the filmmakers acted as the project’s managers on the ground, and as its representatives in the global public sphere.

I first came across the project in 2004 while browsing the IDFA website.⁸ At the time, I was working as a film producer in my hometown, Buenos Aires, in Argentina. Months later, in my capacity as editor of Glocal Times, a communication for development web magazine published by Malmö University in Sweden, I contacted the filmmakers via Videoletters.net and arranged an interview. At that point, the initiative looked to me like a dream project that would cover several bases with a bearing on the communicative fabric of society, and this good impression is evident in the article that I wrote after the interview.⁹

Communication as tool and trouble

Within the international development cooperation system, uses of mediated communication to do good are generally expected to yield success in the form of straightforward links between actions taken and results achieved, and of prescriptions for scaling-up and replication. This mindset interferes with the critical study of communication as both tool and trouble (Silverstone 1999; Hesmondhalgh and Toynbee 2008).

Drawing on considerations by media and communications scholar Roger Silverstone (2005) and political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005), I framed my study of Videoletters within an understanding of international development communication as a political form of mediation with multi-sited consequences (Enghel 2014, 2016). Mediation is a key word here, understood, following Raymond Williams (1983, 205), as intermediate, indirect agency between otherwise separated parties to a relationship. This definition allowed me to decouple development communication from technical understandings of mediated intervention as some thing with its own determining properties, and to consider instead the ways in which its practice on the ground, the institutional project that underpins it, and its symbolic take-up by other social agents, may act as “agencies for quite other than their primary purposes” (Williams 1983, 204): not only to do good, but also to communicate do-gooding.

When development communication is deployed to do good, processes of mediation connect¹⁰ donor countries – via specific interventions and their implementers – to their beneficiaries of choice – the citizens of recipient countries, and sometimes their governments (Enghel 2016). In the case of Videoletters, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the UK sought to promote reconciliation among ordinary citizens of the successor states by way of the filmmakers’ project, and addressed the governments of those states by proxy via their national broadcasters, which were approached to air the documentary series.

When the deployment of development communication serves to communicate do-gooding,¹¹ a story about how development communication works well to do good for distant others in need is told to a donor’s tax-paying constituency. The story connects the donor with its own citizens and, by extension, with a presumed global audience (Enghel 2016). In the case of Videoletters, the storyline was that watching a moving documentary together would lead a divided region to reconnect and reconcile.

Following Williams (1983), uses of mediated communication to do good and communicate do-gooding should not be understood as opposites: in actually existing interventions, they are in fact extremes of a range of possible intermediate instances where elements of both may overlap and compete. In the case of Videoletters, the overlap was an observable empirical fact that exemplifies well Silverstone’s (1999) conceptualisation of the media as “tool and trouble”. A given mediated communication intervention may be intended as a “tool” for positive social change, but it is also “trouble” inasmuch as its proponents’ concern with reputation management may interfere with their duty of care towards the subjects that the intervention is meant to benefit.

To quote Silverstone:

We need to be able to identify those moments where the process appears to break down. Where it is distorted by technology or intention. We need to understand its politics: its v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of table and box
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Communication in international development: towards theorizing across hybrid practices
• PART I “For” and “about”: interrogating practices across domains
• PART II What next? Rethinking conventional approaches
• Epilogue: what’s bad about “looking good”? Can it be done better?
• Index