What is participatory communication? Does the application of participatory communication methods to research programmes really produce more effective results? This paper traces the history of participatory communication and describes its contemporary meaning as a citizen-led approach to creating and expressing new knowledge. Examples from the Citizenship Development Research Centre (DRC) suggest that, in the context of civil society, participatory communication can increase activism and action and contribute to sustainable development.
Participatory communication involves a process of dialogue created through multiplicity, culture and context. It often uses non-textual means, such as film, music, drama and storytelling, to create genuine communication between people based on citizens’ own forms of expression and understanding of local realities.
Participatory communication emphasises the values of people-led rather than expert-led development, focusing on rights and empowerment through local knowledge and expression. Within research, people have historically been seen as recipients of outcomes. Participatory communication implies an ongoing process of engagement to create a genuinely transformative process. The rise of civil society creates spaces where researchers can get involved in the contestation of power relations through interaction, negotiation and debate.
Research outputs often reflect the values and politics of the researchers themselves. However, participatory communication methods can be used in conjunction with traditional methods:
- In Nigeria, researchers worked with the Theatre for Development Centre to bring citizens into the theatre to examine citizenship and promote rights; they produced plans to share with policymakers.
- In Rio de Janeiro, favela community researchers conducted interviews and then produced a film about a man getting involved with drugs. The film was shown in a packed cinema to an audience including local legislators, and the story was covered by a national newspaper.
Participatory communication requires researchers to adopt roles as facilitators. They need to work with communities to generate new knowledge, rather than simply gathering or extracting data, producing their own analysis and communicating an output to an end receiver. Participatory communication can bring people into research. In particular it can:
- Encourage local people to communicate their needs and achieve empowerment; particularly in research ‘as activism’ or in participatory action research
- Be an important approach to research methods rather than just to research outputs: the research sets out to listen, participate and dialogue with people
- Add more depth to research findings than conventional methods where subtle meanings of research – for example, tacit, cultural or spiritual – may be lost.
