麻豆约拍

This year’s celebrations were two weeks after the largest ever conference focused on Social and Behaviour Change communication (SBCC). The two worlds, which I sometimes uncomfortably straddle, have a history of not connecting.

The had a broad agenda, ranging from mass media outputs to reduce maternal mortality to behavioural economics and artificial intelligence. The relationship between those using media in these ways and those supporting independent journalism has been a source of tension and disagreement over decades. But as support to both independent media and social and behaviour change communication (also called “communication for development”) appears to be growing, including in donor strategies, it is worth asking whether this tension is really justified.

The disagreements work in both directions, but if we are to achieve the concerted and connected action necessary to support healthy democratic information and communication environments in the 21st century we must avoid unnecessary arguments. This is one we need to get over.

Often independent media organisations in developing countries see social and behaviour change communication as instrumental and, at worst, actively undermining them. They sometimes resent the appropriation of broadcast airwaves and news pages with paid for messages apparently telling people what to do and what to think. They resent large budgets spent trying to “train journalists” to write on favoured issues of development NGOs and donors with little or no investment going to the institutions and journalistic architecture necessary to support a strong media sector. They feel journalism exists to hold all actors in society to account, especially those with power and money which includes many development actors, so they are cautious about attempts to “get them on board” with a development communication agenda.

Social and behaviour change communication practitioners have their own concerns. They witness the issues they see as crucial to saving lives routinely sensationalised and misrepresented in journalistic reporting in ways that increase stigma, prejudice and fear. Whether the issue is domestic violence or HIV, malaria or safe handwashing, preparation against natural disaster or getting girls into school, they see much to be gained from encouraging better journalism and public communication around issues which are matters of life and death to millions. They are baffled by the resistance to these efforts by some media development actors.

I have found myself at different times vehemently agreeing with each side. Working with 麻豆约拍 Media Action colleagues on a recently, the level of anger we found directed at international NGOs - for what many journalists considered substantial capture of the broadcast airwaves - was acute. They complained bitterly that international paid for content of little relevance or resonance to communities was taking the place of local issues and voices. What the Nepali media – including community media – needed, they said, was funding so that they could be what they should be, not the mouthpieces of international development actors.

On the other hand, I spent much time in the 1980s and 1990s working with others to raise public understanding of HIV/AIDS issues in the countries where the virus was spreading most rapidly. Media coverage in these countries was often deeply damaging to the response especially in its stigmatisation of people with HIV/AIDS. Worse still, there were cases where even in the West denied the links between HIV and AIDS. I think some of this reporting had a real chilling effect which prevented policy action focusing on HIV for some time. An epidemic of roughly 4 million people being infected in the mid-1980s transmuted into a pandemic of almost 30 million by the time affordable treatments became available in the early 2000s. To this day I get irritated by media development organisations talking about social and behaviour change communication as being all about “AIDS messaging” when the best organisations responding to the pandemic were as focused on generating voice and dialogue as they were on information provision.

There are examples of work across both fields that show I am not the only one to see these divides as unhelpful.
Leading media development organisations like the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation (), ANDI or AMARC have a clear focus on achieving social change and advancing development objectives. Most media development organisations justify their receipt of development funding by arguing that they contribute to improved development outcomes – even if that is couched in terms of improving accountability or social cohesion. A central thrust of media development action in recent years has been to position independent media as a key concern of international development actors, including concerted (and successful) advocacy by organisations like the Global Forum for Media Development to get the issue integrated into the .

And the “SBCC” field increasingly recognises that change happens through dialogue, debate and action rather than messaging. Two decades ago, the “SBCC” field was a “BCC” one focused largely on achieving individual level behaviour changes. The “Social” is now centre stage as we understood that improvements in family planning owed more to the women’s liberation movement than it did to improved awareness of contraception, that preventing the spread of HIV owed more to the empowerment and action of those affected by the virus than it did to communication around wearing condoms. Today, communication is increasingly about social change whether in the form of the #MeToo movement, new forms of identity politics, or to plan for when Ebola might strike. Debate and dialogue requires healthy, independent information and communication spaces.

There is also increased recognition in the SBCC field that techniques to achieve shifts in behaviour are becoming ever more sophisticated and effective. Behavioural economics provides a powerful positive addition to the options of approaches available but the role of Cambridge Analytica and the capacity to meld advances in behavioural psychology with big data and online communication provide deeply concerning prospects for what “social and behavioural change” might look like in the future. So the SBCC field is increasingly focused on developing clear ethical frameworks for its work and leading the debate on “who decides” what norms get shifted and which behaviours get changed.

An emphasis on people is a key way to bridge these divides. Media development actors believe that people need information and platforms for public debate to take and influence the decisions that shape their lives. So too do social and behaviour change communication actors. The former may mostly focus on, for example, decisions around how to exercise democratic rights (most obviously around electoral choices). The latter may focus on having the information to decide to decide to have your child vaccinated against polio. These may sound very different arenas but let’s take polio. The principal challenge of eradicating polio in recent years has not been a lack of a vaccine, a functioning system to deliver that vaccine or lack of public awareness. In a small number of countries it has been rumours and misconceptions – often fanned through social media –that the vaccine is a Western plot. Ultimately, efforts to eradicate polio rest on access to information that the people most affected by an issue can trust and relate to their lives. That is the preserve as much of media development as it is of social and behaviour change communication.

There are encouraging signs of improved organisation within these fields and across them. On the media development side, the Global Forum for Media Development has become an increasingly effective and organised network of media development actors working together to improve the credibility, effectiveness and importance of the field. A new alliance – the “Global Alliance for Social and Behaviour Change Communication: building informed and engaged societies” has been formed through the leadership of several organisations, especially Unicef and the Communication Initiative (my organisation is or will be a member of both). I hope that an agreement will be reached to at least connect and cooperate with each other.

James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at 麻豆约拍 Media Action. He is also on the international steering committee of the Global Forum for Media Development and on the advisory board of the Communication Initiative. He is an adviser to the OECD Development Assistance Committee Governance Network focused on improving donor coordination around media assistance and has provided strategic support to networks of philanthropic organisations focused on media support.