General remarks

Since the 1950s, the meaning of development communication has changed. Changes should not be surprising considering that “development,” a concept that together with “modernization” and “Third World” emerged and dominated academic and policy debates in the 1950s, has lost much of its past luster. New concepts have been coined and gained popularity but have not displaced the broad notion of development communication. Despite its multiple meanings, development communication remains a sort of umbrella term to designate research and interventions concerned with improving conditions among people struggling with economic, social political problems in the non-Western world. Like “development,” “communication” has also undergone important transformations in the past five decades that reflected the ebbs and flows of intellectual and political debates as well as the changing fortunes of theoretical approaches.

The absence of a widespread consensus in defining “development” and “communication” reflect the larger absence of a common vocabulary in the field (Gibson n.d.). This conceptual ambiguity and confusion should not be surprising considering that different disciplines and theories have converged in the field of development communication. There has been a confluence of overlapping traditions from a variety of disciplines that imported vocabularies that had little in common. For example, do concepts such as “empowerment,” “advocacy engagement of communities” and “collective community action” refer to fundamentally different ideas? Not really. The presence of different terminologies does not necessarily reflect opposite understandings but, mainly, the existence of different trunks in the family tree. In a fragmented field, diverse programs and strategies are rooted in a myriad of intellectual fields that were rarely in fluid contact.

Despite the diversity of origins, however, it is remarkable that there has been a tendency towards having a more comprehensive understanding of “development communication.” The historic gap between approaches has not been bridged but, certainly, there have been visible efforts to integrate dissimilar models and strategies. Consider Jan Servaes' (1996b) definition of development as a multidimensional process that involves change in social structures, attitudes, institution, economic growth, reduction of inequality, and the eradication of poverty. For him, development is a “whole change for a better life.” This notion comes close to the idea of “another development” that emphasizes the satisfaction of needs, endogenous self-reliance, and life in harmony with the environment (Melkote 1991). We would be hard-pressed to find approaches and interventions that essentially disagree with such encompassing idea of development.

Similarly, different approaches have gradually adopted an understanding of communication that is not reduced to the idea of information transmission, but includes the idea of process and exchange. Certainly, the persuasion model of communication maintains a towering presence in the field. Socio-psychological models of behavior and perspectives grounded in stimulus-response communication theories continue to dominate, arguably because some premises of the “dominant paradigm” remain widely accepted. The model of top-down, sender-receiver communication has been revised, however.

The idea of “communication as process” has gained centrality in approaches informed by both behavior change and participatory models. Moemeka's (1994, 64) words illustrate a widespread sentiment in the field: “Communication should be seen both an independent and dependent variable. It can and does affect situations, attitudes, and behavior, and its content, context, direction, and flow are also affected by prevailing circumstances. More importantly, communication should be viewed as an integral part of development plans – a part whose major objective is to create systems, modes, and strategies that could provide opportunities for the people to have access to relevant channels, and to make use of these channels and the ensuing communication environment in improving the quality of their lives.”

This perspective is somewhat akin to “ritualistic” models of communication that prioritize the Latin roots of the word (as in “making common” through the exchange of meaning) that gained currency in the field of communication in the last decades (Carey 1989). Communication is understood as communities and individuals engaging in meaning-making. It is a horizontal, deinstitutionalized, multiple process in which senders and receivers have interchangeable roles, according to participatory theorist Jan Servaes (1996a). From a perspective rooted in behavior change models, Kincaid (1998) has similarly argued that all participants are senders and receivers. The difference lies in the fact that whereas approaches largely informed by the dominant paradigm continue to think of communication as a process that contributes to behavior change, participatory models are not primarily concerned with “behavior” but with transforming social conditions.

Another salient feature of recent studies in development communication is the increasing influence of theories and approaches that were originated or have been widely used in health communication. Health communication has received more attention than education or agriculture, issues that were central in early projects of development communication. Certainly, issues such as literacy, agricultural productivity, violence are includes in many contemporary development plans. Behavior change, social marketing, and health promotion models have become increasingly influential in development communication, however. In a way, the growing centrality of health issues should not be surprising considering that family planning and nutrition, for example, have been dominant in the agenda of development communication since the 1960s. Additionally, attention to HIV/AIDS since the 1980s further contributed to the ascendancy of health and health-related approaches in the field.

On the one hand, this shift could be interpreted as a reflection of the priorities of funding agencies. Although further research is needed to support this finding, it seems that the presence of health issues and, consequently, the influence of health communication approaches express the agenda of development organizations. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted as a result of the emergence of a broader approach to health issues. The definition of health as “a state of well-being,” widely cited in contemporary studies, allows a more comprehensive approach that includes issues such as illiteracy and poverty that were not integrated in early development communication projects.

keywords: change theories

social change