The subtitle of this volume The Basis for a Renewal was deliberately chosen not only for its provocative possibilities but also because it reflects a genuine belief that this field has somewhat lost its way and is meandering along in a context rather ironically characterised by a global expansion and a multiplicity of Communication for Social Change (CSC) interventions. In theoretical texts on communication and social change, the turn towards participation is often highlighted as the beginning of a new era in communication, one in which horizontal communication has replaced vertical, top-down flows. However, participation, as practitioners from the field have reminded us, is always power-laden and is differentially experienced by people located on the value-chain. While it is tempting to ascribe to post-structuralist understandings of the ‘multidirectionality’ and multiplicity of power flows, which seem to characterise the nature of power flows in some countries and contexts, we argue that this is not a universal condition. In the specific context of communication and development in which a handful of organisations with vast resources exert both discursive and material power, power flows are much predictable. While one can argue that even in such contexts there is resistance, for example, by innumerable local groups who use new and old media in strategic and tactical ways to light up alternative pathways to development, such interventions are by their very nature small scale and their impact localised. We would still argue that a multiplicity of alternatives does not by itself amount to a challenge to the dominant paradigm of communication and development precisely because the buy-in to the dominant version of development is extensive, global and multi-sectoral and includes governments, corporates and civil society. Florencia Enghel and Karin Wilkins (2012: 9), in their opening piece in the special issue of the Nordicom Review, articulate this angst:

The theorisation of CSC has always been dependent on borrowings from other disciplines – from rural sociology that provided the basis for the diffusion model to the radical pedagogy best illustrated by the contributions made by Paulo Freire (1972). Freire’s theory of radical pedagogy was linked to the project of cultural action in which participation was validated through an action–reflection process that resulted in a politically informed awareness – conscientisation. In a chapter in a volume on Freire’s contribution to communication and development, Thomas (2001: 241) has highlighted the fact that ‘if anyone were to write a history of participatory communications, the place of key Freirean terms in that history, inclusive of “participation” and “cultural action” as idea, process and praxis, will need to be acknowledged’. In other words, Freirean thought provided both a conceptual framework and the practical means to operationalise these concepts in practice, and this became a key foundational basis for that ‘original’ turn towards participatory communication. While the critique of the dominant paradigm, dependency and media imperialism did not provide solutions, Freire’s understanding of dialogue and relationality as the basis for communication provided the basis to explore people-based communication solutions. His theory is a classic example of critical social science, given that it was built on a theory of false consciousness, a theory of crisis, a theory of education and a theory of transformative action (see Fay, 2011). While ‘false consciousness’ sounds like a quaint Marxian category from yesteryear, in our way of thinking it is important that we invest in understanding the manner in which power flows affect our understandings and shape mindsets related to the practice of CSC. CSC theorisation has also been shaped by a great variety of ‘isms’ and schools of thought, including Marxism, feminist theory, post-colonial and subaltern theories, identity theory, globalisation, social movement theory and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for development theories. In recent times, social networking and urban interventions have also contributed to shaping the practice of CSC, although, as yet, there is little evidence of such practicebased interventions contributing to an enlarging of the frameworks for theorising CSC. While one can argue that these many borrowings and traditions of inter-disciplinarity have contributed to the shaping of CSC as a field and to its dynamism, it is also clear that a consequence of these many influences is the existence of a variety of fault lines – between theory and practice, between technology and the social, policy and the implementation of policy, the global and the local, technocratic and managerial approaches versus endogenous, people-centred approaches (see Thomas, 2012, 2014). There are those who have argued that there has been a grand co-option of all those terms that once seemed to suggest that another world is possible (see Cooke & Kothari, 2001).

The existence of CSC as a field that is strongly practice- and applications-based has not surprisingly led to the development of theoretical traditions that provide pathways to the implementations of practice. Take, for example, the theory related to the ‘diffusion of innovations’ popularised by the late US scholar Everett Rogers. This theory that evolved in Europe at the turn of the 19th century and was perfected in the 1940s in the mid-West of the United States in the context of rural sociology essentially provided explanations on how scientifically developed ideas and innovation related to productive agricultural practices could be diffused throughout any given farming population. In hindsight, it is not at all surprising that this theory became a key to an understanding of the purpose and practice of communication for development, given that its strength lay in explaining how communication interventions could contribute to greater agricultural productivity. This was a key objective of economic modernisation that bound together countries under the aegis of Pax Americana as well as Pax Russia on either sides of the Cold War. This embeddedness in a resolute growth and productivity paradigm has characterised CSC interventions down the ages. It can be argued that communication interventions that enabled behavioural change for greater productivity helped nurture people in the South to become more closely intertwined with the project of modernisation and the global capitalist economy. However, one can argue that diffusion was not merely a theory that advocated the value of new ideas stimulating greater productivity but that it was also, in a fundamental sense, a theory that advocated for a specific vision of evolutionary change based on universal pathways to development. The narrative that it was based on is as follows. The success of greater wealth production in the United States was based on growth and productivity and on closer integrations between scientific ideas and productivity. Nations now have the option to replicate this success by adopting ideas and innovations and mainstreaming these ideas across all productive sectors. However, in order to achieve such productivity, people need to think differently and acknowledge the value of the new. They need to aspire to be modern. The state needs to provide the environment and structures to help communicate the diffusion process although the key drivers have to be private capital – agro-chemical companies that supply fertilisers, seeds, pesticides and the like. Ideally this environment needs to be suffused with the values of capitalism and large farmers with larger land holdings, access to capital and therefore greater options for increasing productivity ought to be given opportunities to become the drivers of productivity. Communication was vital to educate people on the values of diffusion, marketing it through the mass media and interpersonal communication through change agents and opinion leaders, investing in top-down channel flows and some form of feedback. These were mainly one-way flows of communication, from the top-down, and the media had an instrumentalist role in acting as a mediator and broker for the diffusion of new ideas and new practices, the latter often supported by generous sponsorship from large industries involved in the manufacture of agricultural inputs. The theory of diffusion attempted to explain the rate of adoption, the processes of adoption, the personality types associated with early and late adopters, the role of opinion leaders in the adoption process and was accompanied by a relatively simplistic five-stage adoption model from awareness and knowledge of the innovation/idea to its confirmed adoption and use. This was in many ways a perfect model in the context of both planned, dirigiste development adopted by the Socialist bloc and the capitalist agricultural enterprise that was based on close links between science, technology and productivity.

The practice of CSC involves a variety of initiatives that include the following: