Development Communication and Participation: Applying Habermas to a Case Study of Population Programs in Nepal

Published in Communication Theory in 2004, this study explores a new direction of theorising participatory communication through the discussion of a population and reproductive health programme in Nepal. The authors assert that participatory communication remains undertheorised and lacks clear definition. This study is not intended to evaluate the impacts of the participatory strategies employed in the population programme; the goal is to initiate a theoretical discussion that would lead to useful indicators of participatory communication in future communication programmes. The authors claim that the new approach would allow development project practitioners to better distinguish communication programmes and strategies that are participatory from those that are not. Jürgen Habermas's theories of communicative action, public sphere, and ideal speech are used as conceptual frameworks to examine the nature and scope of participation in communication processes that occured during this programme in Nepal.

Evaluation/Research Methodologies:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has worked for more than 15 years with the government of Nepal and a variety of agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to address challenges posed by Nepal's population growth rate. The study specifically discusses the communication strategies developed by communication and health professionals and local partners from Nepal's Ministry of Health, Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs, and Johns Hopkins University Population Communication Services. Participation was intended to play a key role throughout a multifaceted programme of activities, ranging from short-term to long-term activities, from local community events to mass media campaigns. The programme consisted of three broad areas of action: (1) interpersonal communication and counseling, (2) radio serial dramas, and (3) networks for behaviour change (NBC). Programme components were designed to mutually reinforce one another.

The study presents theoretical reflections of the programme's specific communication components in light of Habermasian ideas relevant to participatory practices.



Key Findings/Impact:

(1) Interpersonal communication and counseling

One of the goals of the Nepal population programme was to promote horizontal, dialogic communication between health workers and clients. This emphasis on symmetrical participation in communication was intended to address the non-participatory or anti-participatory natures of the information transmission (sender-receiver) approach, which had long dominated development communication practices in the post-WWII development efforts. A series of workshops were developed to train health workers in participatory communication skills. Workshops encouraged health workers to break down status differences between clients and providers, to engage in interactions in which clients would speak freely, ask questions, and make informed choices, and to disclose all the information available to clients so that clients would make their own rational decisions.

The authors view this strategy as conceptually analogous to "communicative action," which, according to Habermas, is an exercise of open, undistorted, and non-manipulative speech on matters of public importance. Health workers were to become not only the participant in symmetrical communication, but they were also trained to promote active participation of local people in the deliberation of population and reproductive health issues. The authors argue that more conventional top-down, unidirectional dissemination of prescriptive information by institutional actors (e.g., health workers/officials) to clients may constitute what Habermas calls "concealed strategic action," which is a speech act characterised by systematic (conscious or unconscious) manipulation of information toward goals that are not mutually determined by all participants. In extreme cases, information is purposely distorted to achieve communication goals. The Nepal programme sought to minimise this possibility.

(2) Mass media

The population programme developed and broadcast two radio serial dramas in order to circulate information on specific topics of public health concern to large numbers of people. The first radio serial was targeted at the general population. The messages encouraged individuals to speak about family-planning issues openly with health workers, families, and partners, and plan their families to suit their own interests and choices. The second radio serial was addressed to health workers and promoted positive client-provider interactions, complimenting the training workshops on communication skills for health workers.

The authors maintain that mass media are not necessarily non-participatory. In the Nepal case, mass media were employed to promote participatory communication. Further, the authors list a number of ways in which audience participation was promoted. Some of them were: broadcast of listener letters, extensive formative research to incorporate clients' needs and interests into radio dramas, the use of Nepalese production team and local language, and an extensive series of community meetings to gather and record listener comments and reactions to the broadcasts.

The authors compare these practices to Habermas's concept of the public sphere. The public sphere is a discursive space where open public debate on matters of public importance is carried out by non-exclusionary groups of private citizens, free from the manipulations by formal politics and market economy. The authors note that mass media do not normally valorise dialogic and horizontal communication, and are typically considered ineffective channels for participatory development projects, which tend to emphasise village-level and other small-scale practice of participation. Drawing on Habermas's claim that the public sphere is scalable, the authors argue that the particular way the radio serials were employed in the programme may be considered a scaled up exercise of civic deliberation. Efforts were made to foster listener dialogue and to incorporate listeners' needs and feedbacks into the radio serials production. The authors assert that the popular and professional supervision of the production distinguished these radio serials from commercial media, propaganda, and other forms of nonpublic and anti-participatory media communications.

(3) Networks for behaviour change (NBC)

The third area of participatory activities in the programme was a series of community-level health activities, which were organised in collaboration with more than 60 local NGOs between 1994-2001. Local citizens participated in and/or watched street dramas, song contests, games, and other activities that revolved around themes related to health and family planning.

Many of the NBC activities were aimed at the dissemination of health information to local people but some were designed to create discursive spaces within the community through public events where people could talk about health in the open. To the extent that not all NBC activities were explicitly designed to promote civic deliberation of health issues, not all would have fostered communicative action in a true Habermasian sense. The authors use the case of NBC to suggest the importance of evaluating the extent to which such communication campaigns are subject to review under discursive democratic conditions. They argue that such an exercise would allow practitioners to differentiate communication strategies that are persuasive yet participatory, from those that are targeted at persuasion and behaviour change through non-participatory and manipulative means.