Preface: Communication for Social Change: An Integrated Model for Measuring the Process and Its Outcomes

Communication for Social Change Working Paper Series

In April of 1997, 22 communication professionals, community organisers, social-change activists and broadcasters from 12 countries met in Bellagio, Italy, at a conference sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation to examine the connections between social change and communications in the 21st century and to explore the possibilities of new communication strategies for social change. A follow-up meeting took place in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1998 and 2000 (Gray-Felder and Deane, 1999). The members of these meetings defined communication for social change as "a process of public and private dialogue through which people define who they are, what they want and how they can get it" (1999, p. 15). These meetings clarified the most important questions and provided the appropriate perspective for an inclusive and participatory model of social change, but they did not specify any particular model (Gumucio, 2001). Nevertheless, a consensus was reached regarding the key components of such a model:

• Sustainability of social change is more likely if the individuals and communities most affected own the process and content of communication.
• Communication for social change should be empowering, horizontal (versus top-down), give a voice to the previously unheard members of the community, and be biased towards local content and ownership.
• Communities should be the agents of their own change.
• Emphasis should shift from persuasion and the transmission of information from outside technical experts to dialogue, debate and negotiation on issues that resonate with members of the community.
• Emphasis on outcomes should go beyond individual behavior to social norms, policies, culture and the supporting environment.

Following these recommendations, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs, at the request of the Rockefeller Foundation, has developed the present report, Communication for Social Change: An Integrated Model for Measuring the Process and Its Outcomes. The purpose of this report is to provide a practical resource for community organisations, communication professionals and social-change activists working in development projects that they can use to assess the progress and the effects of their programmes.

The model presented in this document is intended to help close the gap between the questions defined by these meetings and a resource that can be used to advance some answers to these questions. Quoting one of the reviewers of an earlier version, the document offers a "concrete, workable framework that can provide a far more refined idea of how this work [development communication] might actually proceed in the field."

Social change is an ongoing process that can be spontaneous or purposeful. There are more sources of social change than can possibly be treated adequately in a single document. The Communication for Social Change Model is limited to how social change can happen through a process of community dialogue leading to collective action that affects the welfare of communities as a whole as well as their individual members. This report provides a set of key indicators of the process and outcomes of such social change.

There is a widespread awareness in the field of development communication that community participation is a valuable end in itself as well as a means to better life. However, there are probably as many ideas about what participation is as there are people who are using it (White, 1994). According to Gumucio, "...the concept of participatory communication still lacks an accurate definition that could contribute to a better understanding of the notion" (2001, p. 8). Rather than trying to provide a definition that satisfies every purpose, the Communication for Social Change Model focuses on the process by which dialogue — as a participatory form of communication — is related to collective action. Only by limiting the notion to a specific, concrete process is it possible to develop a set of workable indicators that can be used by practitioners and still correspond to existing theories of communication and social change.

Although social change [1] is a broad concept, which covers many social problems, our discussion of the model is limited to examples of problems related to health. The model is quite comprehensive, however, and can be readily applied to any social problem that requires enhancing a community's capacity to solve its own problems. The model includes individual behavioral outcomes as well as social-change outcomes, and thus attempts to integrate the two paradigms of development communication that sometimes compete with one another. We hope that the social-change model will also help translate the philosophy of participation into an effective process which motivates groups to collective action, increases cooperation, and allows them to monitor their progress and improve their own capacity.