What advantages can dialogue between society and its government offer over one-way communication? This book chapter from the World Bank examines ‘dialogic communication’, or democratic deliberation, arguing that it offers citizens and public officials an opportunity to come together to find solutions to problems. Dialogic communication may be especially helpful for resource-constrained governments in designing public policy measures that find broad acceptance. Political analysis must guide development actors’ use of communication strategies.
One way communication between governments and citizens (monologues) use technologies in strategic and instrumental ways to institute effective governance. At the heart of monologues lies the rhetoric of persuasion. The demands or solutions are predesigned. Examples of this style of communication may be: ‘participatory’ governance in which the stakeholders are arbitrarily selected and sanction predetermined governance outcomes; or media campaigns that raise expectations of the good life from a government lacking the resources to meet them. Dialogic communication could be a way out of both dilemmas.
Dialogic communication is communication in which both parties problem solve and arrive at mutually altered positions. Monologic communication is not discounted in social organising and finding voice or in making public processes transparent and accountable. However, a deliberative democracy involves citizens in problem solving.
- Communication technologies offer several spaces for such deliberation; there is no ‘one communication technology fits all’. Deliberative communication can range from street theatre to an ‘e-town hall’ featuring online deliberation.
- People respond much more readily to problem solving when the particular issues find resonance and are interconnected with other issues in their lives. This approach accounts for the ready reception and success of street theatre in imparting HIV/AIDS education or that of socially conscious soap operas or telenovellas.
- Chains of expertise can connect various forms of communication media. Thus, a street performance by illiterate women can be instructive as a best practice to women across the world using other technologies in which civil society organisations, international organisations, or government officials step in to interconnect people.
In moving toward dialogic communication, how can political analysis be used to guide communication strategy in governance reform? This depends on whether the possibilities of dialogic communication are to be documented by the development practitioner, or implemented and articulated in the form of a development communication project or intervention itself.
- Documentation is by no means an easy task, but the practitioner must undertake this exercise prior to even suggesting any form of communication intervention. Information collected on the presence and absence of views (voice) needs to detail the sociocomplexity and power hierarchies in people’s lives.
- Traditional social assessment techniques need to be combined with ethnography and identity narratives to reproduce the complexity of identity and the possibilities for voice.
- Similarly, government officials may or may not be amenable to allowing for monologic or dialogic development communication interventions. In-depth interviews and knowledge of official or bureaucratic cultures may uncover the political spaces or issue areas within which these possibilities exist.
