Communication and Social Change

A Citizen Perspective

Thomas Tufte

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509517817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How do the communication practices of governments, NGOs and social movements enhance opportunities for citizen-led change?

In this incisive book, Thomas Tufte makes a call for a fundamental rethinking of what it takes to enable citizens' voices, participation and power in processes of social change. Drawing on examples ranging from the Indignados movement in Spain to media activists in Brazil, from rural community workers in Malawi to UNICEF's global outreach programmes, he presents cutting-edge debates about the role of media and communication in enhancing social change. He offers both new and contested ideas of approaching social change from below, and highlights the need for institutions – governments and civil society organizations alike – to be in sync with their constituencies.

Communication and Social Change provides essential insights to students and scholars of media and communications, as well as anyone concerned with the practices and processes that lead to citizenship, democracy and social justice.

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Towards a New Social Thought in Communication and Social Change

A Call for a New Social Thought

The French sociologist and theorist of new social movements Alain Touraine makes a powerful call for ‘a new social thought’ in his book Thinking Differently (Touraine 2009). Touraine abandons the ‘exhausted evolutionism’ of the dominant discourse and seeks to recognize that the subject should be based on the right of all individuals and groups to be recognized and respected:

The most profound thing about the social thought we inherited was the positivistic conviction that modernity meant the elimination of … any kind of reference to the consciousness of actors. We were taught to content ourselves with two principles when it came to analyzing behaviours: the rational pursuit of self-interest or pleasure, and the fulfilment of the functions required by the perpetuation and evolution of social life. (Touraine 2009, 5)

Touraine’s call for a new social thought is a timely commentary on the dominant neoliberal development discourse, which increasingly seems to be incapable of respecting the rights and needs of every individual and group to be recognized and respected, but instead allows market logic to determine who is heard, who can voice their concerns and who is empowered to act.

There is a growing questioning of the dominant Western model of economic growth. A highly detailed example of this critique comes from the French economist Thomas Piketty. His book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) questions the ability of a capitalist economy to prevent inequality. The critique of the neoliberal economic model is much broader, however, as reflected in the post-colonial critiques of Western development paradigms (Escobar 1995; Bhabha 2004; Fanon and Markmann 1952; Mbembe 2001) and seen in the emergence of new ways of conceiving development, such as the ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ in Bhutan (Ura, Kinga and Centre for Bhutan Studies 2004) or the notion of ‘Buen Vivir’ in Latin America, which emphasizes sustainability and ecology as elements of a good life (Silva 2011).

The idea of this book is to approach contemporary studies of communication and social change within this wider call for a new social thought (Touraine 2009, 92) that is embedded in a sociology of the subject and agency. This is a sociology that recognizes at the outset the potential power of active sense-making and the action of the individual. Furthermore, it places this sense-making and action within the domain of the collective. What is proposed in this book is a notion of the subject that is radically different from the dominant paradigms within communication for development.

I propose a ‘citizen perspective’ on communication for social change that is embedded in this broader sociological call for a new social thought. This opens up opportunities to revisit the concepts of modernity and development, and the ideas of individual action and of social movements. It will require a deeper analysis of the underlying cultural models that influence local processes of deliberation and activism. However, a citizen perspective is first and foremost a proposition for a notion of the subject that opposes functionalist approaches to processes of change, and consequently to communication for development and social change. As Touraine argues, we ‘have to get away from anything that defines sociology as the study of social systems and their functions … the most important thing is that the behavioural conformity is no longer imposed by particularity of a culture of society, but by the way everyone is constructed as a subject who has universal rights as well as an individual being’ (Touraine 2009, 8).

This approach enables communication for development scholars to take an often neglected step back from analysing the particular strategies for communication implemented by specific organizations and social actors, and instead embed and review the communication practices and relations between subjects and institutions from a much broader social and cultural perspective. Only then can we start to construct a deeper and less instrumental understanding of the relation between communicative practice and social change. For many within the field of communication for development, this is more about ‘unlearning’ established perspectives on strategies of communication, loosening up and becoming more open to seeing communication as a fundamentally social, relational and dynamic process.

Emerging questions

In reviewing the changing character of communication practices between citizens and institutions, a number of concrete questions emerge:

• How do scholars and practitioners understand and conceptualize development, agency, participation, media use and communication practices?
• How are today’s young citizens making use of the digital media? What synergies are sparked between old and new media and communication practices?
• How do institutions communicate with their constituencies? To the degree that they are pursuing social change objectives, what notion of social change informs their communicative practice?
• What outcomes are the social movements achieving? Can they sustain their mobilizations beyond the short term?
• How, if at all, are social movements and their communicative practices influencing the ways in which United Nations agencies, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other stakeholders communicate with citizens?
• Have the massive civic engagements and their multiplicity of demands influenced the global development debate? If so, what novel notions of development are we seeing?

This first chapter offers a critical review of the main lines of research on social change- and social justice-oriented media and communication practices. This book has grown out of an interest in the interdisciplinary field that deals with the role of communication in processes of development and social change, but is written at a time when this discipline is almost drowning in its own success. A prolific research interest has emerged around the dynamics between media, communication, civic engagement and social change. It is being approached from a variety of perspectives, many of which have evolved in parallel with each other – but with only limited cross-fertilization.

With the objective of challenging the impermeability of this ‘silo thinking’, this book identifies and discusses how each of these fields contributes to a deeper academic insight into the relations between media, communication, civic engagement and social change. First, however, this chapter retrieves key developments in the field of communication and social change from the silos with which it has traditionally been associated. As a first step, let us visit two locations where citizens engage in communicative practices that offer examples of the different dynamic relations that exist between practices of communication and processes of social change.

Liberating Pedagogy in Rural Malawi

On a hot afternoon in the south-eastern corner of Mulanje, Malawi, a group of farmers, mostly women, has come by bicycle or on foot to a ‘difficultto-access’ deep rural site, a wall-less school building on the outskirts of a village some 50 kilometres by dirt road from the nearest town. The meeting has been arranged by ADRA Malawi, an NGO that works with dialogic communication, using face-to-face communication to enhance processes of empowerment that enable local communities to advocate for their rights, hold their local governments accountable and improve their livelihoods. ADRA Malawi is a national NGO but part of the larger Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), which has national organizations across the globe. One of the development programmes run by ADRA Malawi is ‘Action for Social Change’ (ASC). It receives the bulk of its support from the governmental bilateral Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), which supports ASC through ADRA Denmark.

Assisted by the training facilitated by ADRA, community-based groups gain insights into their potential role as civil society actors and are enabled to hold dialogues with the relevant authorities and advocate on issues that affect them. ADRA complements this community-based work with the radio dramas it produces for a national audience, which are broadcast in the early morning before the farmers go off to their fields. The television drama ADRA produces is not relevant in this area, where nobody has a television, but is instead directed at the more urban populations it also works with.

Characteristic of ADRA’s work in East and Southern Africa, and in Malawi in particular as the pioneering country in this respect, is the strong strategic use of media and communication as a way to inform, engage and mobilize, as well as raise awareness of and advocate on citizen-driven issues pertaining to the development themes of HIV/AIDS and livelihood/food security. ADRA Malawi has made an explicit and strategic effort to work with both mass media, in the form of radio and television programming, and interpersonal communication, in the form of community dialogue sessions, in its efforts to deal with these development challenges.

The farmers I meet are organized in a so-called REFLECT group, which stands for ‘Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques’. The communication principles practised in these groups originate from the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire, whose ideas of a liberating pedagogy have been widely used and incorporated into education policies around the world, and become a strong strand of thinking in the field of communication and social change. Freire’s ideas have travelled far, from his work on literacy and a bottom-up liberating pedagogy in Brazil in the 1950s and early 1960s, to work focused on participatory communication led by the Institute for Development Studies in Sussex in the 1980s. The REFLECT methodology was later spread further by Action Aid, and is now widely used by many development NGOs.

Since 2011, ADRA Malawi has incorporated the creation of REFLECT groups into its community-based work with rural communities, building on its work since the early 1990s, but now with an explicit long-term development goal of strengthening ‘a vibrant, locally rooted civil society in Malawi which can be a dynamic actor in social, political and economical development processes in areas of livelihood/food security and health’ (Action for Social Change: ADRA Malawi Programme 2010). Thus, although communication practices and the strategic use of media platforms are central to its work, the overarching agenda is advocacy and social change in the areas of health, food security and livelihoods more generally.

What I witness on an afternoon in August 2012 is a group of local villagers meeting at one of its regular assemblies to discuss the challenges faced by group members, taking turns to draw problem trees, identify possible solutions and, facilitated by an ADRA ‘community facilitator’, formulate strategies to deal with these challenges (see figure 1). The group members seem very confident with each other, and also with the ADRA community facilitator, who is from the region and regularly rides his motorbike out to the village to participate in the meetings.

Figure 1. REFLECT group at work in a village in southern Malawi

Source: Thomas Tufte

Central to pursuing the group’s programme goals is a training methodology built around the REFLECT pedagogical and operational methodology. This helps ADRA enhance the capacity of local communities to organize themselves, and communicate and advocate on core issues relevant to stakeholders in order to achieve improved services, better prices and – at the end of the process – improved livelihoods.

The inbuilt logic of ADRA’s work with REFLECT is the assumption that synergies can be created between development challenges such as HIV/ AIDS prevention, food security and improved livelihoods. ADRA’s work with REFLECT also contains a component focused on building ADRA’s capacity to become part of and further support the development of a vibrant civil society in Malawi. Finally, the work on REFLECT and community orientation is linked to ADRA’s development of dynamic national and local media platforms that can enhance the social processes articulated at the community level.

The important question is therefore: is ADRA succeeding in communicating for social change? What I observed on that afternoon, and what I have seen repeatedly in ADRA’s work over a decade, is the unfolding of a gradual and expanding awareness-raising process that is enabling communities to articulate demands and engage in collective action. Numerous results have been achieved, such as successfully holding the local government accountable for rebuilding a broken bridge, negotiating better subsidies on fertilizers, and achieving better facilities for voluntary counselling and testing for HIV and AIDS. Less visible, but fundamental, is what Paulo Freire called the process of ‘conscientization’ or, for want of a better phrase, the awareness-raising process that led to processes of ...