I took the train from Colombo to Kandy in Sri Lanka, which often features on the list of the most beautiful train rides in the world. Upon alighting in Kandy, I met Sunil Wijesinghe in a tiny stationery shop tucked between small nondescript shops lined up on the road to the Peradeniya University. Wijesinghe, a former employee of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), is one of the early community radio (CR) broadcasters in South Asia. Now managing the shop, he sat down to relate the story of South Asia’s first community radio station1 (or community-based radio station, as the debate rages on).
Cut to a roadside bench in Kathmandu. The stories being narrated by Raghu Mainali, the Nepalese community radio activist par excellence, were those of the days of the King’s takeover of Radio Sagarmatha’s station and confiscation of equipment. And of an open truck shaped like a radio, atop which speeches and performances as part of the rally for the Save Independent Radio Movement (SIRM) were carried out. Nepal’s vibrant community radio scene amid civil war makes for a story for the history book!
Pan to the waters of Munshiganj in Bangladesh, where the bedenaari, the women of the bede community, live on boats near the shores of the local water body. They are part of the listeners group that Radio Bikrampur FM 99.2 counts among its community. The country, often ravaged by floods and cyclones, is home to a planned community radio sector, often drawing on sustainability and phased growth of the CRs, as cornerstones.
Cut back to Colombo, to the International airport outside which I met and chatted with Samanmalee Swarnalatha, the feisty activist who narrated stories of standing tall to pressure from local radio authorities, funders, and the state, on behalf of Saru Praja FM’s community. Her stories showcased the state of community-centric radio on the pioneer island, just a little less than three decades hence.
For me, the train ride, the truck, the boats, and the airplane symbolised some constitutive moments (Collier and Collier 1991) that flagged off diverse journeys that are integral to the story of media in South Asia. The above narrative sets the tone for numerous realities that community radio encounters in South Asia today—that of some past glories, glimpses of people’s activism for their right to free speech, an ever-changing media landscape, and sustainable growth as a concern. This book is a critical study of policies and policymaking for community radio in four countries of South Asia, namely, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. The book delves into the praxis of policy, recounting episodes and narratives from policy actors who bring their own values, stances, epistemes, and even ideologies. The interplay of all varied facets of the policy process for community radio in Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh makes for well-fleshed out narratives and policy stories from South Asia.
South Asia is home to diverse media systems, in congruence with the larger political, economic, social, cultural, and legal contexts. This book explores and explicates the policies and policymaking for community radio in the region. The region emerges as integral to the study, lending its own particularities to it. From localised geographic features to divergences in the degrees of democratic politics between the countries that occupy and make up the region, South Asia emerges as a character in this expansive policy ethnography. Media in South Asia has been studied with various underpinnings—developmentalist, postcolonial, and even orientalist vantage points. This book, as will be demonstrated in the chapters ahead, seeks to engage with the modern phenomenon of community radio in South Asia, piecing together a critical policy ethnography focused on the region. The deliberative policy ecology approach, expounded in Chap. 2 of this book, emerges as the heuristic device that houses and guides such a study.
This chapter presents an overview of the broad fields of inquiry that this book concerns itself with—that of media policy studies and community media. By bringing together relevant literature on these broad fields of study, this chapter sets the stage for the forthcoming chapters that delve into the ethnography of policies and policymaking for community radio in South Asia. The first part of this chapter provides an understanding of the field of Media Policy. It looks into the theorising of media policy, inclusive of the many elements and points of interrogation that goes into the defining of the field. The chapter then presents the critical study of media policies, including the historicising of such a study. This is followed by a section that provides an understanding of how community media has been defined and theorised and how such forms of media have been approached in terms of thematic appreciation. The chapter then moves on to provide an overview of the policy documents such as legislations and regulations, as well as the policy environments for community radio across the world. The chapter then provides the rationale and approach to the present research endeavour and moves on to provide an overview of the many theoretical strands that inform this study, posing questions, objectives, and points of inquiry at the start of the study undertaken. The chapter ends with an overview of the ones to follow.
Media Policy Studies
To say that media policy as a field of media and communication research has been under-theorised over decades of the discipline’s growth is no hyperbole.2 Media policy research is often conceived of as administrative research, relegated to a corner in the larger machinery and study of government, industry, or international organisations. The rudiments of the field have received very little attention in comparison to the cultural, social, and economic dimensions of studies in media and communication research. From the study of industries, to that of particular cultures, and from dimensions of development studies to health communication, media research has grown and thrived in its multidisciplinary offerings. Such studies have drawn on the humanities and social sciences research traditions, besides other multidisciplinary interfacing with the sciences. However, studies on media policy, with roots in post-Second World War media research, have been seen as instruments that accompany such offerings. It is only in the last decade and a half that one can see media policy research gaining ground in Europe and North America. In the non-West, like in South Asia for instance, media policy research came to be identified with the State and its national priorities initially and with the programme of globalisation and the spread of the culture industries, after the 1990s. The term ‘media policy’ came to be connected with the policies adopted by corporations and organisations in their dealings with the media. In other words, an organisation would chart out a ‘media policy’, as part of its public relations activities and interface with the media. Further, research in the field sought to look at how the mass media influenced public policy, becoming another arena that associated itself with the term. It encompassed representation of research in the media to influence various public policies across fields.
As a stand-alone field of research, media policy studies has only been gaining ground in recent times, located as it is at the intersections of global media studies, governance studies, and public policy research. In such a scenario, it is now opportune to ruminate on drawing the broad contours of the field of Media Policy: How does one define Media Policy as a field, and media policy replete with its action-oriented underpinnings? What follows is an immersion into the many facets that go into defining the field of Media Policy, while the action-oriented underpinnings of the term would find explication further ahead in the chapter.
Theorising Media Policy
Efforts at theorising media policy take into account the many facets of the process, including the conundrum with defining what media policy is and separating the area of study from other studies on media.
The Definitional Problem
Defining media policy is fraught with difficulty, given the ambiguity of what the constituent elements are and how they come together as ‘policy’. Des Freedman talks about how there is no such thing as a ‘singular’ media policy that can be said to represent all those mechanisms that streamline media structures and systems. Media policies exist in plurality, reflecting the diversity of media systems from print to broadcast and now, the new media, the multiplicity of settings in which they are produced and the variety of actors that impinge upon the formulation of policies. Media policy is, at best, says Freedman, an umbrella term to refer to a wide range of discourses and methods that impact the functioning of media. It is also not accurately descriptive of a multi-layered heterogeneous setup (Freedman 2008: 2).
Sandra Braman (2004), discussing what she calls the definitional problem, brings to attention the evolving meaning of the phrase ‘media policy’. Braman goes on to highlight the key parameters to define media policy for the twenty-first century. Among them, she writes: (a) the definition should be valid and must map on to empirical reality, (b) it must be comprehensive to include all settings, actors, processes, flows of information within its ambit, (c) it must be theoretically broad to permit various frames of reference, must be methodologically operationalisable, thereby drawing on accepted methods scientifically examining policy, and finally, (d) it must be translatable in the sense that new developments should be translatable into the language of ‘legacy law’.3 Drawing on these parameters that make a good definition of media policy, Braman states that media policy in its broadest sense is co-extant with the field of information policy, which involves issues that arise at every stage of an information production chain that includes information creation, processing, flows, and use (Braman 2004: 179).
The Myth of Neutrality
Scholars like Marc Raboy, Des Freedman, Paula Chakravartty, and Kathryn Sarikakis examine the myth of neutrality that plagues the theorising of media policy. Drawing on Streeter’s observation that it is only the English language that allows for a distinction between the words ‘politics’ and ‘policy’, Chakravartty and Sarikakis critique Harold Lasswell’s conception of policy as an apolitical process. Upholding the ‘moral superiority’ of the bureaucratic policymaking process, Lasswell suggests that the process is free of political influences and is non-partisan by nature. However, Samarajiva and Shields (1990) at a later date highlighted Daniel Lerner’s and Lasswell’s roles in formulating policies for the US government for propaganda in the Middle East during the Cold War, indicating that the vantage points from which policies are made are never neutral and are laden with intrinsic values and motives. These debates notwithstanding, it is important to note that Chakravartty and Sarikakis assert that a separation of politics from policy is not only artificial, but also ideologically loaded in that it rather inaccurately allows for neutrality. It also does not serve the purpose of critical reflections on the processes and contexts that shape policy (Chakravartty and Sarikakis 2006).
The coming of the ‘Information Society’ and the accompanying international governance structures only ensured that media policy is further embedded in ‘multilateral politics and the debates that surround it’ (Raboy 2007: 346). Des Freedman talks about going beyond seeing media policy as either depoliticised or technologically determined. He, instead, sees it as an arena where competing political leanings, ideological standpoints, and power plays operate. Policymaking becomes political when some viewpoints get preference over others. Critical reflections on policy call for unearthing those marginalised viewpoints (Freedman 2008: 5–6). Similarly, Chakravartty and Sarikakis note that their work on media policy and globalisation seeks to take into account not just voices that pronounce specific media policies, but also those that oppose the dominance of certain viewpoints. Dissenting voices, they say, are very much part of the study of media policy (Chakravartty and Sarikakis 2006). McQuail (1992) notes that media policy is grounded in the political and cultural dimensions of communication processes. Media policymaking, then, is anything but a neutral, apolitical process. It operates in, and emerges out of, specific circumstances that are created due to the interaction of varied actors across levels, with diverse intentions and influences at play.
Going Beyond the Technological Imperative
Much of the academic research on media policy has been technology-centric. By stressing on technology as the force that ‘creates’ media, the study of media policy has historically demarcated policies on the basis of medium-specific...