Uderstanding the role of community media in local development

 

Beyond economic growth, which is an engine and not an end in itself, development is first

and foremost social . . . A development model that ignores the cultural dimension is bound

to fail. (UNESCO, World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, 1995)

There are different definitions and geographically based experiences of what community media

are or should be. Without being exhaustive, this section presents a brief overview of theoretical

and empirical works on the features of community media and their contributions to local

development. I argue that community media add to the social and cultural dimensions of development

by providing channels for participation, social and political empowerment, and the

exercise of citizen rights, as they work for community building by transforming individual

experiences in a shared vision of (a better) reality.

According to Hollander et al. (2002), community media provide public communication

(‘made available to everyone’) within a specific context: the community, understood not only

as a geographical setting but primarily as a social setting. Community media are devoted to

the ‘reproduction and representation of common (shared) interests’, and ‘the community

serves as a frame of reference for a shared interpretation’ (Hollander et al. 2002: 23). Emphasis

is on the symbolic experience or the transformation of ‘private individual experience into public

collective experience’ (Hollander et al. 2002: 26). This is, I believe, where one of the main contributions

of community media to development lies: in the making or reinforcing of social ties

as the symbolic basis for change. The message is that ‘together we can make it’: in this sense,

community media offer marginalised communities a means for empowerment.

Strongly connected to broadcast media, and radio in particular, the category of community

media comprises print media, such as newsletters and local magazines, and nowadays

encompasses digital forms, such as podcasting.3 However, radio is still the dominant media

for poor communities, because of costs and accessibility: radio transmitters are cheap, easy to

use for illiterate people and where landlines and the Internet are still a mirage. The case studies

provided in this paper concentrate on radio as the media catalysing the widest concern among

policy makers and advocacy groups for its relevance in developing countries.

In the effort to find a policy-operative definition that could be taken for active consideration

by policy makers, community-media advocates have reframed the concept in many ways.

A comprehensive list of features and principles unifying the sector has

been identified by CMFE. These include freedom of speech and media pluralism, public and

gender-balanced access, promotion of cultural diversity, not-for-profit status, self-determination,

transparency in structure and work, and promotion of media literacy. I will now look into some of

these features.

Community media are often characterised by a high degree of horizontality, openness, and

possibilities for participation: they are ‘the means of expression of the community, rather

than for the community’ and ‘media to which members of the community have access . . .

when they want access’ (Berrigan 1977: 18). According to Dunaway (2002: 63), it is a

matter of access for ordinary citizens (‘uncensored, uncontrollable and inconsistent’ amateurism,

maybe even naive) versus a merely commercial audience building. For Girard, community

radio ‘aims not only to participate in the life of the community, but also to allow the community

to participate in the life of the station . . . at the level of ownership, programming, management,

direction and financing’ (Girard 1992: 13). But if participation is multi-level, emphasis is

especially on dialogue and communication as a two-way process (Carpentier et al. 2003).

Offor (2002) argues that, to promote social and cultural change, community radio needs to

be not only a channel to transmit to people, but also a means of receiving from them: not

only an instrument to hear from or about the world, but the people’s voice, to make their

voice heard.

Community media cover diverse topics, but often they embrace what can be called a ‘social

mission’. For example, an educational focus characterises many stations in Africa: health- and

childcare programmes, farming tips, human and women’s rights, literacy classes. Their impact

is more relevant when programmes are created by the community for the community.

On the financial level, community media often have (and should have, according to most)

not-for-profit status, and typically a good portion of their workers are volunteers. They represent

a ‘non-commercial way of doing communication’ (Francesco Diasio, personal communication,

2005) independent from political or economic pressures. In some cases, they do not broadcast

commercials, both as an editorial choice and because they do not represent an appealing target

for advertisers. However, the lack of stable funding mechanisms, such as state-managed subsides,

jeopardises their very existence, and solutions are currently being sought .

The community communication concept draws from experience in the field of communication

for development. The most active international institutions in the field have been the

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, since the late 1980s, the

leading agency for the UN Inter-Agency Roundtable on Communication for Development4),

and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The

latter is particularly concerned with the development of community media, which ‘ensure

media pluralism, diversity of content, and the representation of a society’s different groups

and interests

I believe that community media contribute to development at the grassroots level, notably the

most difficult to reach through major top–down development programmes. When done by the

community for the community, community media contribute to development in two (main)

ways:

. At the process level, as a channel of participation: community media represent the ‘voice of

the voiceless’, enabling citizens to raise their concerns; as open-access media they represent a

instrument for the exercise of democracy.

. At the symbolic level, as a means of empowerment: giving people the possibility to take

initiative on the local scale, they show that change is possible. They represent a way to exercise

and express the imagination, and to translate this imagination into practice by voicing it.

Through the filter of community media, what starts out as individual becomes a collective

experience; in this sense, community media contribute to creating shared meanings and

interpretations of reality, and to highlighting opportunities for change.

Αντάρας Αθανάσιος-well grow