Asian Contributions to Communication for Development and Social Change

Abstract

The debates on the role of media and communications in promoting sustainable development acknowledge the multiple experiments that were undertaken from the 1940s and 1950s as being key to laying the foundations of the field we now call development communication or communication for development. Yet, as has been emphasized over the years, it is the agriculture communication and extension experiments at the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, that would herald the pioneering contestation of development thinking using media and communication in Asia. Considered together with the Asian Tigers’ approaches toward radical economic development, the Asia’s schools, institutions, organizations, and governments demonstrated that there was a different way of thinking about and doing development beyond what the western modernist theories and perspectives were proffering.

This chapter is a celebration of the Asian contributions to development communication, which was a term employed by the pioneers of the field. Over the years, other terms have come into use, including communication for development and social change. While the emphasis has been placed in the fact that these were pioneering contributions, this chapter examines the specific attributes of such a contribution and how, considered in retrospective, students of society will come to appreciate the fundamental aspects of theory and practice today that trace their origins to these experiments. The chapter highlights seven of these contributions in order to demonstrate the fundamental concerns that drive the agenda, processes, and partnerships in the field. The chapter acknowledges that the field has moved on; there is a growing danger of a growing disregard for history, as if the field just emerged without a historical context. Yet it is this very historicity, in Asia, as much as in Latin America and Africa, that continues to shape the practice on the ground, even in the face of the historical revisionism of modernist development approaches mostly being promoted by international development institutions.