Conclusiones

Historically since the 1940s, international development practices promoting modernisation and growth have long affected communication efforts to raise citizen voice, especially in the areas of agriculture, education and health (Servaes, 2008, p. 17; Thomas, 2010, p. 24). Here, development communication most often supported behaviourism (Thomas, 2010, p. 27). That is, a belief that top-down communication flows through “traditional, mass and interpersonal communication” can influence behaviour, which makes people modern (p. 25). In the 1960s and 1970s, communication scholars began to challenge the modernisation paradigm in development (Servaes, 2008, p. 22). As one example, many argued that media technologies, values and content exported from the “First World” through the modernisation paradigm were being used as a form of imperialism and a reinforcement of neo-colonialism (Thomas, 2010, p. 27). There was a growing concern that development communication through modernisation negatively influenced the values

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of developing countries (p. 28). Scholars and practitioners called for a new paradigm that supported grassroots participation in development decision-making, both in development and for development communication.

Around this time, Freire’s arguments for oppressed people to actively participate in generating their own knowledge began to influence the international development sector (Servaes, 2008, p. 21). Of critical interest to development workers was Freire’s argument for using dialogue as a mechanism for strengthening literacy and citizen voice (Freire, 1972). This caused a shift in the international development sector from instructional ways of working to more participatory approaches in practice. Communication efforts supporting development practice followed suit, which gave rise to the approach to practice commonly known as communication for development (Servaes, 2008, p. 21). Through this historical lineage to Freirian theories, Emile G. McAnany (2012a) explains that C4D practice often considers Freire as its “true source of thinking” (p. 91). Thomas (2010), for example, summarises Freire’s beliefs that the modernisation paradigm failed to support oppressed people as it created dependencies (p. 29). In contrast, the evolving participatory paradigm promoted reciprocal decision-making in development communicative processes through shared knowledge, mutual trust and flattened hierarchies (Servaes, 2008, p. 21; Servaes & Lie, 2013, p. 11). The paradigm thus reflected Freire arguments that the “objective of communication should be to extend human freedoms, strengthen and empower people’s voices and that people should be responsible for their own development” (as cited by Thomas, 2010, p. 29).

In support of participatory development approaches, development communication theories began to shift away from promoting elitist, top-down practices that historically supported one-way information diffusion from sender to the receiver (Melkote, 2012, p. 23). Rather, scholars argued for development communication to value culture, democracy and participation from the community level upwards (Servaes, 2008, p. 21). The arguments placed increased attention on the value of raising citizen voice through a participatory communication paradigm. In this way, Freire’s theories influenced the linkage of participatory development programming and communication practices as foundational for C4D praxis (Chambers, 1994a, p. 1253; Servaes, 2008, p. 21). Interest grew in the international development sector for providing people historically silenced in decision-

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making spaces with local access to communication processes (Gumucio-Dagron, 2009, p. 461). Such ideals valued grassroots knowledge, and echoed Freire’s arguments for citizens to individually, collectively and proactively claim the rights to their own words (Servaes, 2008, p. 21). Freire’s (1972) “conscientisation” theories continued to influence C4D practice into the 2000s. This was apparent in Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron’s (2009) definition of communication for development and social change:

People taking in their own hands the communication processes that will allow them to make their voices heard, to establish horizontal dialogues with planners and development specialists, to take decisions on the development issues that affect their lives, and to ultimately achieve social changes for the benefit of their community. (p. 453)

Globally today, participatory approaches are mainstreamed in international development (Cornwall & Scoones, 2011, p. 4). Thus, a natural assumption might be that the participatory communication is the dominant paradigm in the development sector. One might expect that the “main protagonists of processes of social change” now predominantly lead communicative efforts (Waisbord, 2008, p. 507). Indeed, the 2006 World Congress on Communication for Development (WCCD) in Paris promoted such ideals, as described in the Rome consensus (Lennie & Tacchi, 2013, p. 6):

The 2006 WCCD produced a set of recommendations to policymakers based on an understanding that communication is a ‘major pillar’ for development and social change... [with a] strategic requirement for access to communication tools so that people can communicate amongst themselves and with decision- makers; recognition of the need for different approaches depending on different contexts; and support to those most affected by development issues to enable them to have a say. (p. 6)

Nevertheless, despite the global recommendations, modernisation and diffusion theories continue to influence the use of C4D in practice (p. 5). This is where communication is used to transmit messages rather than to meaningfully support participatory development processes (p. 5). Modernisation theories, for example, are widespread through behaviour change communication and new communicative technologies, including ICTs and social media (McAnany, 2012, pp. 2, 27; Thomas, 2010, p. 25). A United Nations study on evaluating C4D activities points to the reason why (Lennie & Tacchi, 2013, p. 5). The study highlighted that a tension exists for C4D between participatory communication and

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one-way communication flows most commonly deployed in well-established international development institutions (p. 5). The logic is that “full and direct participation is incompatible with dominant organisational cultures and practice” (p. 5). As a result, participatory communication is often dismissed in practice through a high-level lack of understanding and/or support of C4D’s value for meaningful change (p. 13). Here, the participatory aspect of social change communication becomes “mere rhetoric, not practiced or implemented in top-down ways” (p. 6). Even when participatory communication is promoted at the organisational level in development, its political potential is often minimised (Enghel, 2015, p. 21), as described in the next section.

2.3.2 C4D and the push for new paradigms

Wendy Quarry and Ricardo Ramirez (2009) argue that development institutions are, overall, risk-adverse and struggle with uncertainty (p. 134). This is why most organisations prefer, in their words, a “telling” style of communication over dialogue-based approaches that might challenge structural inequities (p. 134). Their views mirror similar concerns that the political undertones of C4D approaches—with their emphasis on mobilised citizen participation—are incompatible with the results-based agendas of development institutions (Enghel, 2015, p. 7; Lennie & Tacchi, 2013, p. 5). Accordingly, there is a call for a shift from participatory communication to more political-leaning paradigms that can transform societies (Enghel, 2015, p. 21). Here, scholars argue that communicative approaches must tackle the political barriers silencing citizen voice and keeping people in poverty (Dutta, 2011; McAnany, 2012; Servaes, 2008). For instance, Dutta (2011) argues for a culture-centred approach (CCA) to social change communication to counter “neoliberal hegemony” (p. 2). His approach is one of the more progressive theories for addressing social injustice in contemporary C4D scholarship. CCA is an organisational framework that “envisions communicative processes that interrupt the erasures in mainstream discourses of development, and engages with subaltern voices in seeking spaces for transformative politics and redistributive justice” (p. 8).

The culture-centred approach promotes communicative efforts that can transform people’s oppressive conditions through transforming inequitable local, national and global power structures (p. intro). In this way, social change communication supports the “agency of individuals and collectives in determining their choices” while “interrogating the taken-for-

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granted assumptions that constitute the rules, roles and organising principles of the status quo” (Dutta, 2011, p. 32; 2012b, pp. 57-61). Social change is thus tied to the communicative capacity for citizens living in disadvantage to disrupt, challenge and transform structures and powerful, prominent discourses that foster or sustain inequity (Dutta, 2012a, p. 3). PV activities, it would seem, can support citizens from the margins in overcoming their oppression conditions. However, as Dutta (2012b) argues, only if PV actions help “transform the political, economic and social configurations that have excluded them” (p. 1). The next section addresses how this notion of citizen voice and PV as a political act translates in international development contexts.

2.4 Arguments for raising valued citizen voice