Communication, Media, and Development Policy

Miming Development: The Shortest Distance and International Development

Why are most development organisations - particularly the international agencies it seems - so enamoured with the shortest programmatic distance between two points? First, you need to state the issue you are addressing. Then you need to show exactly how the programme you are proposing or running will directly affect that specific development issue by demonstrating the direct link to and potential impact on a very specific "problem". This philosophy is structured into the planning of most large agencies. Consider, for instance, the "Logframe" which, in its many different guises, so many of us have had to complete over the years: Objectives - Goals, Purpose, Outputs - all specific to the issue you are addressing; followed by Objectively Verifiable Indicators, Means of Verification, and Important Assumptions and Risks - again all specific to the issue the programme is addressing. This is the triumph of direct rationalism over general creativity and inspiration.

But why would that be a problem? For a whole bunch of reasons. Life is complicated. It would be difficult to find any major issue that any of us have faced at any time - from internal family matters to major global concerns [with the possible exception of small pox, maybe - but that will be the focus of another note] where it was just a matter of establishing point A [where we are] and point B [where we want to be] and heading down the straightest line between the two. Life just does not work that way. International development issues [and family ones for that matter] are simply not structured in a way that lends them to the direct, straight ahead, follow the straight line approach. Analyse any issue - from a child's behaviour to the choice of feed for the family goats to why some countries are economically richer than others - and that analysis will include a mish-mash of different cultural, behavioural, political, bio-medical, financial, communication, historical, geographic, religious and any other factors you can name. Forget following a straight line through that development swamp - just try drawing one!

There are two antidotes to the direct line - start at A and head straight for B - approach to addressing development issues. First, just shake things up a little and see what happens. Under the shake it up approach, the goal is not specifically to address HIV/AIDS, natural resource management or democracy and governance, for example, but to simply change the existing patterns of life, note what results and follow the promising routes. Second, establish the central links across a number of issues, highlight those links and focus on the linkages not the individual issues. Under this "common roots" approach, girls in school, local economic development, family size, health care provision and a bunch of other issues are all related - they have common sources. Why not focus on those commonalities?

These thoughts were brought back to the forefront of my mind by an article on the communication strategies pursued by the city of Bogota in Colombia. It is a city whose name evokes, to put it delicately, not the best reputation. My father, for example, receptive to many international stereotypes in his small New Zealand town [itself a stereotype - sorry!], always "held his breath" when he knew that I was visiting Bogota. Recognising the serious issues that Bogota faced, a newly elected Mayor went for "shake things up" and "common roots" rather than "direct line" programming on specific issues. A recent issue of the Harvard University Gazette summarised these (click here for the Gazette online). Mayor Mockus and his city government: installed human traffic mimes who mimicked bad pedestrian behaviour and bad driving; created "SuperCitizen - a super hero"; launched a "night for women", where the only police on the streets were women and were men asked to stay home with the children; distributed 350,000 thumbs up and thumbs down cards so that people could indicate their responses to the behaviours of other citizens; created the "Knights of the Zebra" - a club for good taxi drivers as recommended by the users of taxis; had stars painted on the roads where people had died as a result of a traffic accident; and, implemented a bunch of other initiatives including mass yoga in the park and closing the main city center streets to any vehicles other than bicycles on Sundays. It was not the individual progammes that mattered but the net effect of their combination. Mockus and his colleagues were using "shake it up tactics" to get at some underlying issues that affected all of life in Bogota - respectful citizenship, sense of community ownership and pride in your city. They simply sought to put more smiles on faces, get people talking with each other, introduce some new symbols, create some pride, and change some social patterns. These are not the kind of goals we often see prominently stated in international development.

They seem to have worked. For a city in which, like many other large capital cities, most people come from and identify with somewhere else, 60,000 people voluntarily paid 10% more in taxes to help the city change. Over a 10 year span, from 1993 to 2003, homicides went down from 80 to 20 per 100,000 inhabitants - which was still too high for my Dad's liking but a very significant reduction. Traffic fatalities dropped by half over the same period. 50,000 people became active in a "vaccine against violence" campaign. A policy environment was created that supported drinking water getting to 100% of homes [78% in 1993] and 95% of those homes having sewerage [71% in 1993].

It is difficult, of course, to prove the causal connection between people's behaviour and the city government's efforts. That is always the communication intervention problem. But, given that a major variable between 1993 and 2003 was this approach, there is little doubt that these communication interventions were, at worst, somewhat responsible - and that should be enough.

Just as the mime artists on the streets of Bogota mimed bad pedestrian and driver behaviour, maybe we should muster our communication skills to mime the often poor relevance of the family of "log frame" planning systems in order to encourage more relevant development action. A case of seeing if a pantomimed shake, rattle and roll can win out over patterned planning boxes?

Warren Feek
wfeek@comminit.com
January 27 2005

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