The Panos Institute

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The Panos Institute

• Setting agendas
• the changing roles of development communications
  in the knowledge age

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Outline

• The global context
• Changing development strategies and thinking
• Debates over knowledge and the changing
  communication environments
• Changing nature of development problems
• Unprecedented opportunities for and importance of
  role of communication - but also major threats

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Starting Point No. 1 Globalisation

• societies have less capacity to shape and control
  their own future, and economically strong
  societies do more to shape the economic,
  political and cultural environments of
  economically weak societies than vice versa
• poverty alleviation and empowerment cannot happen
  in isolation from other places and other issues -
  all is connected
• Both globalisation and the protests against it
  not reflected by level of public debate in the
  South

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Globalisation - countervailing forces

• The strength of civil society and globally
  organised protest (Seattle) - enabled through
  ICTs
• Globalisation links the global to the community -
  ICTs enable people and organisations to do the
  same
• Corporate PR and power not always working - those
  in power being forced to engage and respond
  Monsanto World Bank

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2. Changes in Development Strategies

• Shrinking development assistance funding
• Renewed ambition - poverty reduction targets
• Development strategies benefiting from more
  joined up government - e.g. debt
• Emphasis on political and policy environment -
  the rise of good governance and recognition of
  importance of civil society and context of
  assistance

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Changes in Development Strategies

• More participatory, people-centred development -
  empowerment focused
• Beyond the project more co-ordinated, coherent,
  owned development strategies - e.g.
  Comprehensive Development Framework PRSPs
• Potential downgrading in conditionality
• Donors exposing policies to public debate
• Recognition of role of knowledge in development

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3. Rise of the Network Society - ICTs

• ICTs and knowledge centred development
• Capacity of people to access knowledge and
  information for themselves massively increased
• Capacity for networking and horizontal
  communications increased - a complex
  communications environment
• Economic and social development dependent on
  extent to which societies can become more
  knowledge based (GKII)
• This in turn dependent on societies mapping out
  their own responses to opportunities provided by
  ICTs (ADF)

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The debates over knowledge

• Some of most successful (development) use of ICTs
  not about delivery or access to knowledge but
  networking and debate
• Extending infrastructure can only happen with
  private sector - jury is out re role of
  development assistance
• Strategies to provide access to ICTs for the
  poorest often unclear in their results - but high
  levels of learning between organisations
• As in other areas, pilot projects proliferate
• Policy environment is critical
• Knowledge not the same as information, but sense
  people make of information

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Network Society and the other information
revolution

• Liberalisation of media, especially broadcast
  media
• Rise of community media
• Greater media freedom
• More entertaining, attractive, popular
  programming
• The rise of the discussion programme - phone-ins
  etc.
• Convergence - e.g. internet and radio

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3. Changes in development challenges - the legacy
of Cairo

• Reproductive Health and Rights - untying the
  social straightjacket
• providing services is not enough
• political and legal change is essential - but
  also insufficient
• the broader social context also needs to change

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Changes in development challenges

• HIV/AIDS
• strategy has been to impart accurate, targeted
  information, often at specific population groups
  (women, young people, drug users, men)
• but not to enable societies to take ownership of
  the issue, to discuss it in terms that has
  meaning, that allows inaccuracy.

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An unprecedented opportunity

• An international climate of debate and openness
• the power of new communications technologies
• a media revolution that is enabling unprecedented
  public debate

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An unprecedented opportunity

• For societies and communities increasingly to
  forge their own development agendas through
  informed, inclusive public debate
• For external actors and those with money and
  power to work within those agendas
• For large scale social change within countries

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Unprecedented threats

• Domination of the channels of communication by
  narrow economic and political interests
• Danger of increasingly centralised,
  unimaginative, centrally driven development
  policies
• The trend is of accellerating economic and
  political marginalisation of the poorest nations
  and the poorest within those nations
• Survival in the South requires sacrifices in the
  North (e.g. global warming)

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Some implications

• Communication - no either/or approaches to
  communication, but different approaches depend on
  each other
• increasingly, purposeful communications cant
  succeed or be sustainable without reference to a
  wider enabling environment

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Some implications

• as much as it is about education or persuasion,
  development communication is about enabling
  people to shape their own priorities and
  providing access
• to information
• to power
• to channels of communication that enable people
  to make their voices heard
• Create channels beyond the community to the
  mainstream

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Some implications

• Focus on creating an enabling environment
  (policy, communications, project) as much as on
  specific project interventions
• Create channels beyond the community to the
  mainstream
• Moving beyond the project - make connections
  between themes, between levels (community,
  national, international)

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Some challenges

• Most organisations doing communications work do
  so on a project basis, normally sectorally, not
  on creating enabling environments
• Need for parallel strategies using all approaches
  and experiences at our disposal

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Some questions

• How essential is accuracy in communications?
• Are we prepared to let people make their own
  mistakes and learn from them?
• Are we prepared to surrender institutional
  agendas?

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Some characteristics that inform Panos work

• Process of producing information can be as
  important as the information itself
• Provide information that enables people to let
  their own minds up about issues - a range of
  perspectives
• As accessible and publicly available as possible
  - accuracy regarded as critical
• Feed in the perspectives of those most affected
  by development issues

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Some characteristics that inform Panos work

• Building capacity woven into all that we do
• Making connections between all levels -
  community, national, global and vice-versa
• Accountability needs to be clear, formal and
  structured
• Unafraid of placing (difficult) issues on agenda
  but limited agenda of our own