James,

Thanks for presenting these challenging questions and still so pertinent to us practitioners. My name is Ronald Kayanja, I am Governance Advisor responsible for Media and Civil Society in the United Nations Mission for East Timor.

Increasingly, development agencies believe that building democratic governance in post-conflict and fragile situations requires building the capacity of the media as part of the entire package which ussually includes: conduct of elections; establishment of State Institutions--a working civil service, parliament, political parties, the justice system, security institutions etc. Indeed UNDP and the UN Department for Peacekeeping operations are now starting to focus on media capacity building. In the past such organizations saw media as avenues for their public information work.

In my view, media capacity building as part of re-establishment of democratic governance is fragile or post-conflict countries is still new, and studies will have to be done to enable us answer some of the questions you raise. For instance, in East Timor, UNDP, USAID and now the EU are investing millions of US dollars largely focussed on three areas: legislative framework; journalists training--including the plans to set up graduate courses at the University; and support for media sustainability as effective businesses. How will this impact on the fragile democracy that is East Timor? We are yet to establish this.

A recent study by Monica Nogara (Jan 2009) of UN DESA titled "Role of media in curbing corruption: the case of Uganda under President Yoweri K. Museveni during the “no-party” system" concludes that where media have been effective in promoting accountability it has been because they worked as part of broader civil society--including political parties, NGOs etc--and with support of donor actors. This is an important point, in my view. We should look at media as part of broader civil society. A strong media on its own may not achieve much if the broader civil society is not strong.

But thanks for raising these important questions which we should continue reflecting on.

Ronald Kayanja (rdkayanja@hotmail.com)