Communication for Another Development

Listening before Telling

Wendy Quarry, Ricardo Ramirez

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848136304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du développement

This lively book argues that in the development process, communication is everything. The authors, world experts in this field as teachers, practitioners and theorists, argue that Communication for Development is a creative and innovative way of thinking that can permeate the overall approach to any development initiative. They illustrate their argument with vivid case studies and tools for the reader, drawing on the stories of individual project leaders who have championed development for communication, and using a range of situations to show the different possibilities in various contexts. Free from jargon, and keeping a close look at how development is actually being implemented at ground level, this book is an important contribution to development studies not just for students but also for development practitioners and policy makers.

PART I

What we know

TWO

The meaning of ‘another’ development

When we talk about good communication we are really expressing an attitude to development. In this way the word ‘communication’ becomes a proxy for addressing the need for another development. It has taken us quite a while to be aware of this.

For many years we thought that any international development project would be greatly improved by building in a planned communication strategy. This is true up to a point. Lately, we have come to understand that we should be looking at it the other way around – it is in fact good development that breeds good communication. And right now good development seems to have been left behind.

An article by Jonathan Harr in the New Yorker, ‘Lives of the Saints’, describes the trials of humanitarian workers living near Darfur on the Chad side of the border. He quotes from a 2005 institutional analysis of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) describing the organizational culture as having ‘a tendency to behave as though its primary purpose is, for example, to create reports, arrange staff movements and keep itself funded’, rather than ‘protecting and assisting refugees’ (Harr, 2009: 55). Substitute UNHCR for just about any other UN agency or bilateral donor – the same applies. Come to think of it, bureaucracy has increased exponentially with the use of the computer and Internet. This has been happening since the late 1980s. All of us have our favourite stories; this one is from Wendy.

Paul’s briefcase

My husband Paul does not have a bureaucratic bone in his body. A product of the 1960s, he moved from Notting Hill in London (selling antiques) to Egypt (drawing on sidewalks) to Morocco (who knows) to Canada, where I tried to get him to think first (and learn to plan). In the mid-eighties, when we were living in Ghana, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) hired him to set up and manage the first Administrative Support Unit for their personnel living in Ghana. The work covered just about everything you can think of to tend to the administrative needs for all the Canadian-funded projects in the country. This ranged from handling sea shipments at the harbour in Tema, to fixing the plumbing in houses, to going to the airport to meet consultants. Just about every evening he would wind up perched on a seat at the bar set up in the Canadian club, his battered briefcase lying on the floor at his feet. Since everyone knew they would find him there, consultants would arrive and ask him for their passports or visas. Paul would dig into the briefcase and hand them out. They grew to expect this.

A few years after we left Ghana, I bumped into a consultant who knew Paul in Ghana. He told me that everyone missed him. He said that the person who replaced him was in essence a systems man – a person really into the computer. Consequently, the whole Administrative Support Unit was computerized and systems were put in place to track passports, shipments and so on (a good thing). But, the consultant went on, whenever anyone would ask the new director where they could find their passports, he would point to the screen and search the location – in another office, still in the police station, wherever, but never there on the table ready for taking.

Fast-forward twenty years. I am sitting in a coffee shop in London having lunch with a friend recently retired from the British Department for International Development. He is telling me the story of his arrival in Nigeria, where, he said, he walked into the DFID office to find everyone sitting staring at their computer screens, and by corollary not going out to see the country – they were, he said, disappearing up their own arses on matrix management.

He told how he immediately turned right around and walked out. He grabbed a car and driver and drove into the countryside. When they found a few villages, he told the driver to stop. He got out of the car and strode into a village to tell a few surprised villagers that he was ‘there to learn’. The elders appeared to be honoured and organized a mass meeting. Much later, back in the office someone took a decision to focus on justice. But, said he, I never found a village interested in that subject – they had their own justice.

Speaking ‘another’

Paul has a searching instinct and a common sense to get things done. Wendy’s British friend’s visit to the village was about making development work on the basis of seeking people out and listening to needs. Both make sense. Yet, keeping things simple and practical in international development has become rare. The common sense is gone. This is where the notion of ‘Another Development’ has renewed meaning.

Cast your mind back to the mid-1970s. That was when Andreas Fuglesang – a Norwegian communication specialist – collaborated with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation of Sweden to produce the report What Now? Another Development (1975). The report, prepared to coincide with the Seventh Special Session of the United Nations Assembly, set out new parameters for development thinking. It suggested that the eradication of poverty was not simply about growth. While many of us take that thinking for granted today, it has not necessarily permeated the institutions.

What Now? Another Development was based on five core principles: (1) that development be geared to the satisfaction of needs, beginning with the eradication of poverty; (2) that it be endogenous and self-reliant – that is, relying on the strengths of the societies that undertake it; (3) that it be in harmony with the environment; (4) the need for structural transformations. Structure refers to patterns of ownership over domestic resources that reproduce unequal economic relations at the international level.

Any attempt to change this situation depends on the vision, the will and the organizing capacity of those concerned. It implies that they become self-reliant, that they transform the structures which have brought about the present situation, and that they establish the conditions in which the majority poor will have the means to improve their lot. Such a reform affects both socioeconomic and political structures, as well as the linkages between them. (Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 1975: 38).

Finally, (5) it stated that immediate action was both necessary and possible.

Fuglesang wrote several books on communication that complemented the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation work. Sven Hamrell, the executive director of the Foundation acknowledged the Fuglesang contribution to the thinking behind What Now? Another Development. In his preface to Fuglesang’s most famous book, About Understanding: Ideas and Observations on Cross-Cultural Communication (1982), Sven wrote:

It was his unfailing trust in people, his advocacy of people’s ability to decide the direction of their development and his demonstration of solutions found by people that helped shape the notion of Another Development.

About Understanding became a seminal book in the field of Communication for Development. With the support of the Foundation, Fuglesang and his wife Dale Chandler went on to organize the 1983 and 1984 workshops on ‘Methods and Media for Community Participation’. Those events – and many of the people who contributed to them – set the tone for over two decades of communication practice on which we now reflect. (Most of the drawings in this book were prepared by Ricardo for the workshops.)

This brings us to the core idea of this book: It is not good communication that makes good development; it is good development that breeds good communication.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the World Congress on Communication for Development was held in Rome in 2006. A major focus was helping decision-makers understand and adopt Communication for Development. It was a watershed but in an unexpected way. Through writing for the Congress, Wendy began to see that perhaps decision-makers didn’t ‘get’ participatory communication because that is not what they wanted. They understood it all right but they simply did not want participation to confuse their plans (Quarry, 2006). This led us to further thinking about the context within which a development initiative takes place. Perhaps we have taken hold of the wrong end of the stick.

As practitioners we have often promoted the field on the basis of the methods and media. We hear ourselves saying such thing as ‘If you use popular theatre, you will engage the audience as they identify with the characters, and stimulate critical thinking.’ We have pushed the methods and media like magic bullets. However, methods and media are but instruments in a wider context. Politics, power, religion, institutions, policies and personalities set the scene. For our methods and media to play a role, we need an enabling context. We need Another (good) Development.

Two years after Andreas Fuglesang published his book, Father Gaston Roberge wrote a book with a similar title: Another Cinema for Another Society. Roberge advocated that the kind of cinema that was needed had to be other than and different from the bulk of the cinema of the time. Another cinema, he wrote, would be committed to the building of another society. He argued that cinema at that time portrayed the life and times of only a select group of society. Another cinema had to be allowed to grow and be inclusive of the reality of the lives of people and societies at the margin.

Gaston and Andreas were both speaking the same language. Both were people committed to creating the conditions for people to decide on their own development. These two champions were not the only ones by any means. We happen to have a collection of them. They excel at using the communication and media technologies of the day. They are critical thinkers, unhappy with the way development has been going off-track – hence the talk about ‘another’ way of working. The idea seems to be very much alive: in January 2009 we heard of the launch in Guatemala of a book entitled Otra comunicación para otro desarrollo (Another Communication for Another Development) (Gularte Cosenza et al., 2008).

Communication for Another Development, our title, is the way we convey this rediscovery. What Now? Another Development called for helping people improve their lives in their own terms. Intrinsic to this is the role of communication. It is simply not possible to implement this approach to development without enhanced communication between all involved in the process.

The ‘Methods and Media for Community Participation’ workshops brought together practitioners from around the world to share ideas and methodologies for using communication to effect the principles of Another Development. Some were using microscopes to help villagers in Africa learn about parasites. Others demonstrated the power of popular theatre, rural radio and drawing to work with illiterate communities. Tragically, Don Snowden, the Canadian pioneer whom we celebrate in this book, died just months before the second gathering. Snowden had been working with Andreas and the Foundation preparing material for the workshop. It was his suggestion that the second workshop be held in Labrador. In the following quotation he illustrates what ‘Communication for Another Development’ can achieve. He speaks about the Fogo Process, a case where video and film helped communities come together, which we detail later in the book:

Today few people on Fogo speak about the filming, yet many believe their lives were changed enormously by it. This can never be accurately measured. But it is certain that the fishermen formed an island-wide producer’s cooperative which handled and processed large catches, enabling them to keep the profits on their island. Unemployment of able bodied men disappeared, and government directed their efforts to helping people to stay…. Film did not do these things: people did them. There is little doubt, however, that film created an awareness and self-confidence that was needed for people-advocated development to occur. (Quarry, 1994: 17)

What does Another Development look like?

Finding examples of ‘Another Development’ turns out to be harder than expected: they need to be about poverty eradication; they should be endogenous and self-reliant; and they must be in harmony with the environment. And on top of that they must contribute to structural transformation and demonstrate immediate action. Ricardo provides a couple of examples.

Eleven years ago I was the co-founder of a small organization where we tried to do development based on local needs and demands. We called it simply the International Support Group. We registered the organization and gradually managed to secure funding to organize workshops to help rural communities gain more control over how they managed their natural resources. In one instance we obtained funding from Danish foreign aid and agreed to organize training workshops on demand from farmers in East Africa. We accepted only 20 per cent of an agreed project budget to travel to the region and make our proposal known. We promised to return the remainder to Danida if we did not get requests from local groups. As we will see later, this was an attempt to work outside what we call the ‘grey zone’, to be more congruent with the notion of endogenous development.

As it happened, a group of Kenyan organizations took up our challenge and we returned to run a workshop in the Nyeri highlands. The workshop brought together all the main actors in natural resource management into the same room. We spent several days negotiating how farmers, researchers, extension workers and government could collaborate to improve farm production and market access. We dedicated much time to clarify exactly how the different organizations would work together. The methods were not new; many of them were adapted from participatory methodologies. What was different was the fact that the Kenyan stakeholders had organized themselves to make this happen and we had responded (Lightfoot et al., 2001).

After participating in our Nyeri workshop, Michael Kibue, a Kenyan community development worker and social entrepreneur, took one idea from the workshop and ran with it. The idea was that complex issues can be tackled when you bring all the key actors around a table and you provide them with a step-by-step process to explore a problem. USAID uses a similar approach called ‘System-wide Collaborative Action for Livelihoods and the Environment’ (SCALE) where they bring all the major stakeholders to the table from the start (GreenCom, 2004). Michael brought together Masai herders and Nairobi butchers. They negotiated a new way of selling meat with fewer intermediaries. That was the start of the Livestock Stakeholder Self-help Association (Bekalo et al., 2002). Michael is a social entrepreneur (later in the book we will refer to people like him as a champion). He is familiar with the local context and is able to broker new relationships. What I interpret in this example as fitting with ‘another development’ was his lack of dependency on a project package and its inevitable bureaucracy. Instead, he relied on networks of trust and social capital he knew intimately. Once he had established this foundation he did seek international development funding, but on his own terms.

For the second example I cast my mind further back. In the early 1980s I worked for a small Colombian non-governmental organization. We built and operated several small farms where we tested and demonstrated technologies with farmers. This was the heyday day of the appropriate technology movement. We experimented with water turbines, windmills, fishponds, biogas digesters, agroforestry, composting and beekeeping. At one point, two farmers from Los Encuentros, a community in the highlands of Antioquia, visited our demonstration farm in San Luis. At their request we then travelled together back to their community and helped them dig fishponds. It did not take long for them to learn to build fishponds and handle the fish. Some weeks later we returned for a visit and the same two farmers had begun selling fingerlings to their neighbours. They had also improved the draining system for the...