The UK Department for International Development published its latest White Paper this week setting out its strategy for the next few years. Given DFID's reputation and clout throughout the international development system, it is likely to prove highly influential beyond a simple UK government department. I should declare an interest from the outset. The programme I run at the BBC World Service Trust, the Policy and Research Programme on Media and Communication in Development, is...[
Achieving development results - and openly accounting for them - must be at the heart of all we do.- Accra Agenda for Action on Development Effectiveness September 2008 The development system knows that it will fail unless it makes dramatic advances in accountability. Making developing country governments more accountable to their citizens, making international aid providers more accountable to those meant to benefit from it - these are central components of current attempts to make aid...[
John Davison, head of media at Christian Aid, one of the largest international development NGOs, asks in this Polis blog, Media and Development - Where's the Gap? whether major mainstream NGOs should be playing a major role in media for development - or whether taking on such a role risks accusations of neocolonialism. Davison is undertaking more detailed research around this question with Charlie Beckett as a visiting fellow at Polis, the media thinktank based at...[
The BBC World Service Trust is publishing today a new research report, Governance and the Media: a survey of policy opinion. We commissioned this because we wanted to genuinely discover what the view of this issue was in the development policy community. Interviews were carried out with some media and communication specialists, but the main focus was to get perspectives from more mainstream development academics, policymakers, and policy influencers. People interviewed included John Githongo, the former permanent...[
Media development has ridden a rocky but successful road created by the flourishing of democracy, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Support to independent media certainly predated that, and it has had to confront real democratic reversals since, but the past 20 years has generally provided fertile democratic soil in which media development has grown. The straws in the wind are gathering that suggest this period of democratic advance may be coming...[
Yesterday saw the London launch of the report of the “TransAtlantic Taskforce on Development”. Not at first sight the most enthralling topic. Its sunny title “Toward a Brighter Future”, might lead the reader to expect just one more development report entreating the international community to commit more money in pursuit of world peace and prosperity. The fact that it is the product of a group made up exclusively of development experts in the North (specifically Europe...[
Earlier this month, we worked with the Institute of Development Studies in the UK to organize a research symposium on media and democracy in fragile states. The idea was to bring a small group of serious development thinkers and thinktanks from different disciplines together with some renowned media researchers - and practitioners like ourselves. Our aim was to discuss what a more serious and robust research agenda on media and democracy might look like. The...[
One of the pleasures of coming from and living in the UK is how many people say nice things about our media. They say terrible things too, but especially if you work for an organisation which carries the BBC brand, by and large you get a feeling that public interest media is one thing the country does well. It is often held up by others as a good model to follow. The British...[
Rush Limbaugh, the right wing US radio talk show host, argues that one of the priorities of the new Democratic Congress will be the reintroduction of the "Fairness Doctrine". This doctrine – implemented and overseen by the US Federal Communication Commission until 1987 – held that holders of broadcast licenses issued in the US had to present news and other public interest coverage in ways that were honest, balanced and equitable. It was designed to ensure...[
The last decade of support to development can – simplistically - be boiled down to two sets of complementary strategies. The first consists of mobilising financial resources to meet the Millennium Development Goals. This has focused on aid, debt forgiveness and trade justice. The second has consisted of supporting democracy and governance. The latter has had one core component – elections. Elections confer the status of making a country a democracy. They provide the essential check on government,...[
The conversation might go something like this: “We need to be clear that media is important in its own right, it is intrinsic to democracy. It needs to be supported as such, without reference to development agendas. We are talking about media development, a media that is free and independent. We are not talking about media for development”. “Yes, I agree. But aren’t you talking about a certain type of media – a media that serves...[
The great and the good of the global development world have gathered in Accra, Ghana this week in an extremely largely tent. The giant marquee housing the 1,200 or so delegates for the main sessions of the Accra High Level Forum seemed fitting for a meeting designed to find some kind of organisational framework to the work of scores of developing country governments, dozens of bilateral donors and multilateral agencies and thousands of civil...[
Just like London buses. You wait for years for serious attention to be paid to the role of media in development and then three examples of just this happen in little more than a week. Last week it was the Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness at least mentioning media as something that should be prioritised more in development strategies. Then the rather wonderful glitzy, glossy African journalist annual bonanza, Highway Africa which takes place...[
The most important development aid conference of the year kicks off next week in Ghana. The Accra High Level Forum brings together ministers from 100 countries with the heads of bilateral and multilateral development agencies and a good number of civil society organisations. It is a meeting whose outcome will shape how billions of dollars will be spent and ultimately, how many lives can be saved, empowered and improved by spending development money. The main issue...[
In early 2008 the development community watches carefully as Kenyan political tensions and violence rose. A central policy issue was the role of the media. Prompted by that question, The BBC WST, with Kenyan partners produced a paper that "...examines political polarity in the media and its function as a political tool..." For a summary and to access the full text click here.
Policy conclusions described as relevant to development policymakers include:
"The media... play a...[
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