Communication in international development: towards theorizing across hybrid practices

Introduction to Communication in international development: doing good or looking good? edited by Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner (Routledge, 2018) INTRODUCTION Communication in international development: towards theorizing across hybrid practices Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner In international development cooperation, various stakeholders make use of communication in order to promote a globally agreed agenda: multilateral, regional, and bilateral organisations; international and national civil society organisations; and the private sector, among others. These uses generally have one of two broad purposes: to do good, via communication for development and media assistance, and to communicate the good done, via information and public relations. Instances in which both purposes are combined have remained under-researched. Little is known about how they overlap in practice, and therefore about how to address the tensions and contradictions that may ensue from this overlap. The question of whether a prime concern with making aid look good may override efforts to do good has not been sufficiently investigated until now. This edited collection starts from this question. In which ways, and to which effect, are endeavours to do good via communication, primarily directed at developing countries, combined with attempts to communicate good done and/or make aid look good in the eyes of various audiences? 1 We argue that understanding the link between these ambiguous roles is crucial because their overlap may lead to democratic defi cits concerning citizens’ rights – to substantial communication and to sustainable development – across both ends of the donor–recipient equation. Using communication to promote development: a dual purpose The very defi nition of the verb “to promote” refers to a dual purpose: to further the progress of a cause, and to give publicity to said cause in order to raise awareness (Oxford Dictionary, n.d.). The fi rst broad purpose of communication tackled in this collection is to play a positive role in the production of progress, however defi ned by its proponents (Gumucio-Dagron and Tufte 2006; Servaes 2007; Wilkins Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 2 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner 2008; McAnany 2012; Lennie and Tacchi 2013; Enghel 2015). Or to do good, as a shorthand. We refer to progress however defined by its proponents in acknowledgment of Nederveen Pieterse’s definition of development as “the organised intervention in collective affairs according to a standard of improvement” (2010, 3), where what constitutes improvement, and thus adequate intervention towards it, is open to debate depending on ideas of justice (Fraser 2008). This collection focuses on international development cooperation as an activity that meets, or should meet, the following basic criteria: it is explicitly concerned with supporting internationally agreed development goals; it is not driven by profit; it discriminates in favour of developing countries; and it is premised on cooperative relationships between richer and poorer partners (Alonso and Glennie 2015, 2). To these criteria we add a notion of justice by defining communication “as a right to which citizens are entitled, as a responsibility of practitioners,2 and as a capability that is socially distributed in unequal ways and has an ambiguous potential” (Enghel 2014). In our view, adding a notion of justice to the criteria outlined above is necessary because the current internationally agreed development goals, formalised in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the 193 Member States of the United Nations (UN) in September 2015, fall short of foregrounding communication as a right and a capability affected by global/local conditions, and therefore dilute issues of responsibility among stakeholders in this respect (Enghel 2014; Noske-Turner 2017). This shortcoming, of itself, raises a serious challenge in terms of attending to the tensions and risks derived from the overlap between deploying communication to do good, and harnessing it to communicate the good done. To communicate the good done – that is, to inform citizens and other audiences about the nature and value of work undertaken to pursue sustainable development, be it in ethical and substantial ways, or driven by advertising and promotional purposes – is the other broad purpose tackled in this collection. The shorthand proposed in this case – looking good, as per the book’s title – should be taken as an initial red flag (that is, as a critical point of departure) rather than an all-encompassing formulation. Scholarly work regarding the communication of good done by development stakeholders other than international NGOs is hard to find (Waisbord 2008; see Scott 2014 and Thomas and van de Fliert 2014 for exceptions). But grey literature on the matter has mushroomed hand in hand with the transition from the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which served as the overarching framework for international development cooperation between 2000 and 2015, to the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this literature, the main concern is how to raise awareness about the SDGs and convey the positive results of the enterprise3 (Mulholland, Bernardo, and Berger 2017; OECD 2014a, 2014b). It is the fine line between communicating substance – or, more broadly, using communication substantively – and embracing over-simplistic communicative approaches typical of market-driven public relations (and indicative of an understanding of communication and media as commodities) that interests us here. Rather than approach doing good and looking good as alternatives within a dilemma Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 3 such that a choice should be made between them – i.e., as a mutually exclusive binary – the collection addresses them from an integrated perspective. This is not only a methodological and analytical strategy, but also a departure from the existing divides among turfs, both in the practice and in the study of communication in development. We outline the history of those divides in the following section and reflect on its links to this collection’s central concerns. From categorizing divides to “theorizing across” Divides have been typical of studies of development communication over the years. The reader that is familiar with the field’s literature will recall references to, for example, modernisation versus dependency theory, diffusion versus participation, or top-down versus bottom-up approaches (Gumucio-Dagron and Tufte 2006; Wilkins 2008; McAnany 2012). Efforts to bridge these divides are few but significant. In a much-cited report prepared in 2001 for the Rockefeller Foundation, Waisbord discussed the field as the product of convergence between diverse theoretical and empirical traditions, and established a link between this richness in approaches and the ensuing conceptual confusion, pointing at the need for middle range theory (Waisbord 2001, 2). In another well-known study published soon after, Morris (2003) analysed and compared diffusion and participation as the field’s two dominant conceptual models. The article problematised differences between them by identifying overlaps and ways in which proponents of both had in fact borrowed elements from one another, and argued that a new relationship could be established between them by “theorizing across” (Morris 2003, 243) and incorporating the best of both. This collection heeds that call, but focusing on yet another divide: between communication for and about development. Communication for and about development In the wider context of scholarship that confines intertwined aspects of hybrid practices to discrete subfields, research tends to separate the use of communication for and about development. This may be partly because at times they are deployed separately,4 and partly because they have different ends despite sharing common means (Paquette, Sommerfeldt, and Kent 2015). Studies of communication for development focus on do-gooding at the recipient end, while enquiries into public relations as an element of donor-driven communication practices remain rare5 (Paquette, Sommerfeldt, and Kent 2015; Sriramesh 2012) in spite of increasing empirical attention to the role of promotional practices in political communication and governance (Aronczyk 2015; Kaneva 2011) and much discussion of the shortcomings of the core messages and visual politics of international NGOs (e.g. Cottle and Nolan 2007; Chouliaraki 2013; Dogra 2013; Scott 2014). Studies of development politics consider domestic public opinion on aid but do not necessarily incorporate communication and media as analytical dimensions (Milner and Tingley 2013). All in all, more attention is given to communication for development at the recipient end Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 4 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner (Waisbord 2008). In parallel, practitioners in high-level forums worry about how to inform the citizens of donor countries about what aid is and why it matters, i.e., communication about development (Glennie, Straw, and Wild 2012; Eurobarometer 2013; OECD 2014a, 2014b; Mulholland, Bernardo, and Berger 2017). Plenty of scholarship has focused on normative ideals about communication’s presumed power to promote positive social change, and has strived to prove its value (see Enghel 2014, 57–60 for a literature review; Ferron and Guevara 2017; Lennie and Tacchi 2013). Minimal attention has been directed towards the institutional and contextual conditions that enable and constrain the concrete practice (Waisbord 2008). Communication for development is generally understood as a tool that donor countries use strategically in order to support their intervention in recipient countries: a powerful tool, that can be administered to lead to ever-positive results in the quest for social change, and at the same time a neutral tool, that can be geared towards similar outcomes in disparate contexts (Enghel 2014, 2015). Ideally, it will give voice to the disenfranchised, enabling their participation in the making of decisions that affect their lives, and promote good governance by increasing their access to public information and means of expression (Linden 1999; Manyozo 2012). According to Lennie and Tacchi (2013, 2–3), in recent years “a fixation on greater efficiency in the disbursement of aid funding” derived from the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 20056 has led to “an ascendance of accountancy” in the evaluation of communication for development approaches that has complicated its practice, in that donor’s accountability for doing good is reduced to accounting for money spent and visible deliverables (see Noske-Turner 2017 for a discussion of the consequences of this state of affairs). While the substance of definitions of communication for development in academic work tends to remain steady (despite changes in denominations),7 understandings among practitioners vary depending on stakeholders, and have also shifted over the years. One example is the UN, which has worked with communication for development since the mid-1960s. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) have had different approaches despite the existence of a mechanism to facilitate inter-agency exchange and promote cooperation: the UN Inter-Agency Round Table on Communication for Development, held on a biennial basis since 1988.8 A review of documentation pertaining to the ninth, tenth and eleventh round tables, held between 2004 and 2009 (McCall 2009), reveals a lack of coherence and coordination among agencies (see Enghel 2013, 121–2 for a more detailed history).9 Communication about development refers to informing the citizens of donor countries about what development cooperation is, how it works, and why it matters (Scott 2014). This is easier said than done in light of the pressure to demonstrate aid results that followed the adoption of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005. The rise of attention to results is evident in a report commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)10 that differentiates between “communication about results”, akin to corporate Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 5 communication, and “communication for results”, understood as “a tool as well as a process for the effective delivery of aid programmes” (da Costa 2009). According to the OECD, public information is important in order to counteract “misperceptions about how development funds are used, the results they achieve, or even about the government’s rationale for delivering development co-operation the ways it does” (OECD 2014a, 15). Aside from this understanding, which is standard among practitioners, communication scholar Karin Wilkins (2009) has used the expression “communication about development” to define a “critical approach to understanding the ways in which development approaches communicate assumptions about strategic social change” (see also Wilkins and Mody 2001; Mody 2012; Wilkins 2016). This is a most relevant contribution towards adopting communication as an analytical lens in order to reveal the ways in which distinct international development cooperation stakeholders frame problems and solutions. But at the same time, given the overlapping terminology, it can be read as a sign of distance between the concerns and lexicons of practitioners and scholars in the field (a problem discussed by Waisbord 2010). As this Introduction suggests, the divides that we are seeking to address go in at least two directions. On the one hand, a divide between two presumably distinct and distinguishable uses of communication in development cooperation. On the other hand, a divide between scholars and practitioners manifested in their differential understandings. The chapters in this collection contribute to theorizing across communication for and about development by analyzing how and why these interrelate in specific contexts, and to which effects, from an integrated perspective. Attentive to the complex realities of international development cooperation and the ambiguity of mediated communication (Enghel 2014), our central concern is to identify and begin to assess how variations of these functions operate. In our view, actual practices defeat abstract separations, and getting them right calls for dialogue and collaboration across turfs. Defining the key concepts: practices, doing/looking good, hybridity and (in)visibility Four key concepts guided the process of generating this collection: practices, doing/ looking good, hybridity, and (in)visibility. We introduce them in this section. Practices This collection focuses on communication and media in development as core elements of specific practices11 rather than as texts (Enghel 2014; Hesmondhalgh 2013). Practices are at the centre of the relationship between the agency exercised by human subjects and the conditions set by social structures, and can be observed regardless of disagreements about what motivates them.12 They are recognizable “arrays of human activity” (Schatzki 2000, 11) that take place within material Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 6 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner configurations, manifesting both as patterns (which endure between and across specific moments of enactment, and can thus serve as a set of resources to draw upon when practicing further) and as performances (that take place as successive situated acts of “doing”) (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012, 7). A focus on practice makes it possible to distinguish between micro- and macro-levels, and to draw connections between them (as demonstrated by Enghel, Wilson, and Kogen in this collection). The “practice turn” observed in contemporary social theory (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny 2001) has received increasing attention within communication and media scholarship (although it remains generally overlooked in studies of communication for development), leading to insights of relevance to this collection. Hesmondhalgh and Toynbee argue that “media making can be instrumental – in other words, subject to market control or more broadly influenced by powerful social forces – and yet at the same time exist as a zone of relative autonomy and counter-intuitive expression” (2008, 21). Media production is thus an ambiguous practice, open to more than one outcome: it can contribute to sustaining certain “rules of the game” and relations of power, and at the same time be free to act independently at some levels, combining elements of continuity and reproduction alongside elements of novelty and distinction (as is the case in Scott et al. and Noske-Turner et al. in this collection). The relative freedom to act enabled by media making to which Hesmondhalgh and Toynbee (2008) refer is linked to Postill’s argument that “media practitioners, practices and technologies migrate and circulate across field boundaries unevenly, with some practical elements exhibiting a greater in-built ‘detachability’ and ‘reproducibility’ than others” (Postill 2010, 15, 18 and 26). This migrational quality points our attention to the blurring boundaries between communication and media practices identified in several contributions to this collection, e.g. between communication for development and evaluation (Ramírez and Quarry), branding and communication about development (Wilkins), or communication for achieving and telling results (da Costa). Concerned instead with structuration, Couldry (2010) raises the question of how media practices anchor, control, or organise others. That is, which media practices “are defined as part of a larger practice which provides its key reference points” – for example, political marketing, lobbying, and campaigning as part of the wider practice of politics – and how changes in one lead to reformulation of the other (Couldry 2010, 42). If the media in fact “anchor other practices through the ‘authoritative’ representations and enactments of key terms and categories that they provide” (Couldry 2010, 42–3), then it is necessary to investigate how this anchoring works, and what its consequences might be for the organisation of said practices – a problem considered by Scott et al., Wilson, Noske-Turner et al., and Ramírez and Quarry in this collection. Referring to communication as a practice, Craig observes that it “involves much more than using conscious techniques to achieve predetermined goals”, and argues that “a practice derives its value from more than just the ‘external’ goods or pragmatic outcomes it produces” (2006, 44) – an issue analysed by Enghel, Wilkins, and Kogen in this collection. The matter of value is directly linked to our next key concept. Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 7 Doing/looking good In Looking good and doing good: corporate philanthropy and corporate power, Himmelstein (1997) looks into the contradictions inherent in corporate philanthropy in the 1990s, considering the tension between using charitable contributions to further the interests of a company, and to solve a community or societal problem: investments in “doing good” must always speak to the strategic interests of the company in one way or another. This practical, double value is in turn identified by Wilkins (2016) for the case of communication in development: “While critical scholarship raises concerns with how development discourse limits possibilities for civic engagement and social change, development institutions themselves are quite aware and strategic about their public relations, caring not only about doing good but also about looking good while doing so (Kremer, van Lieshout, and Went 2009)”.13 Both authors call attention to the tricky tension that is central to this collection, between doing good for others – i.e. advancing the wider project of global sustainable development for all – and doing good for oneself – i.e. managing the reputation of specific stakeholders within international development cooperation. Attentive to this duplicity, and following Raymond Williams’ methodological approach to his Keywords (1983), we conceptualise doing good and looking good broadly as the extremes of a range of possible intermediate uses of communication and media in international development cooperation – an initial definition to which each of the chapters in this collection will give nuance. Elements of both may overlap, and compete or show synergy, thus leading to more or less ethical practices and democratizing outcomes that may be differential across both ends of the donor–recipient equation. Whether there is competition or synergy can be further discerned by drawing on Richey’s differentiation between good-doing and do-gooding in her introduction to Celebrity humanitarianism and North-South relations (2016, 13), where she highlights Littler’s (2008, 240) definition of do-gooding as a “useful catch-all concept” that describes “a particular type of response to suffering at a distance – one that “generates a lot of hype and PR but is relatively insignificant in relation to international and governmental policy”. This differentiation can serve as an analytical lens for unpacking hybrid practices. The various chapters in this collection contribute rich examples of motivations for, and concrete approaches to, doing good and looking good, that are perceived and treated by some stakeholders as mutually defeating (Scott et al., Wilson, NoskeTurner et al.) but could be handled otherwise (Ramírez and Quarry; da Costa); that actually defeat each other, with publicity prevailing over democratic substance (Enghel, Wilkins, and Kogen); or that shift depending on practitioners’ perceptions of how audiences understand good development (Wilson). Hybridity Attention to hybridity allows us to consider existing uses of communication and media in international development cooperation beyond fixed categorisations. Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 8 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner Recent scholarly and grey literature points in this direction. Scott (2014, 41–6) calls attention to hybrid forms in a discussion of the role of media in addressing or exacerbating poverty and inequality. In his view, available theoretical frameworks do not fully capture the wide range of existing practices, which makes it difficult to consider the pros and cons of those projects that “incorporate objectives associated with either media development or media advocacy”. One of us (editors of this collection) has defined the Videoletters Project (of which more in Chapter 1) as “a hybrid mediated communication intervention that combined elements of various practices” (Enghel 2016, 10), avoiding the categorisation of the project into a strict theoretical type for the reason noted by Durham Peters: that “[f]orms alone of communication matter less than what is done with them (2006, 124)”). Morris (2003, 227) pointed at hybridity in noting that Although participatory communication is often defined in contrast to the more traditional diffusion model, the two are not polar opposites. The diffusion model has evolved in a participatory direction since its initial formulation, and participatory projects necessarily involve some element of information transfer. In a review of major donor support for media-related activities based on OECD data on Official Development Assistance, González Cahuapé-Casaux and Kalatil identify four categories reported by donors: media development, communication for development, public diplomacy, and media infrastructure (2015, 7–8). The authors stress that, because their categorisation was derived from the limited information available in the OECD database, the boundaries between the categories reviewed are not always clear: “projects are frequently hybrids (e.g., a project that supports community radios might include an information campaign on human rights and the promotion of some donor activity)”.14 Once we take these considerations into account, the question raised in the title of this collection – doing good or looking good? – can be rendered into a false dichotomy, which the various chapters contribute to overcome. For example, hybridity is embraced as a strategic solution to existing divides that constrain the practice of communication for development by Ramírez and Quarry, and deployed as an analytical lens by Enghel to unpack the subtle mechanics of a project that mostly failed to do good but registered as having fully succeeded at it. (In)visibility Because uses of communication in international development are largely unregulated, issues of accountability for its planning, implementation, and funding (as well as of the ethics of practice in the absence of professional standards and codes) remain under-researched. Therefore, the specific sociopolitical consequences of said uses tend to go unrecorded, and the responsibilities of various stakeholders remain unclear and unchallenged (Enghel 2014). According to Brighenti (2007, 339), Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 9 “The exercise of power is always an exercise in activating selective in/visibilities”. We take her conceptualisation of “the invisible” as what is considered normal, and thus “unmarked, unnoticed, unthematized, untheorized” (Brighenti 2007, 326), as a call to tease out aspects of the duality of communication in development (or alternatively of the communicative dimension of the good-doing/do-gooding duality) that existing studies have tended to do away with. The chapters by Enghel, Wilson, and Noske-Turner et al. pay special attention to identifying visible and less visible elements of the dynamics under study. Organisation of the book This book is based on the contributions of scholars of media and communication studies and development studies, and of expert practitioners. It builds on discussions first held at the panel “The politics of ‘looking good’ whilst ‘doing good’: Understanding the role(s) of media in international development” convened by one of us for the 2016 edition of the Development Studies Association annual conference.15 The chapters address two overarching research questions. How do different stakeholders handle the double imperative to use communication to do good and to look good? And how do they tread the fine line between adequately informing relevant audiences about the nature and value of pursuing sustainable development, and merely publicizing their specific aid contributions and raison d’être? Contributions are organised into two threads, which we introduce next. “For” and “about”: interrogating practices across domains Part I comprises four contributions that exemplify the multidimensional nature of international development cooperation by looking into varied practices in different domains, each adopting diverse methodologies. The analysis of empirical data serves as the basis to explore and interpret how doing good and looking good are produced in specific contexts. Chapter 1, “A ‘success story’ unpacked: doing good and communicating do-gooding in the Videoletters Project”, by Florencia Enghel, is a qualitative account of how, in 2005, a case of international media assistance to the Western Balkans achieved a high profile in Europe and the US, where it registered as positive enterprise although it failed to mediate reconciliation among the ordinary citizens of the former Yugoslavia. The project, outsourced by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom and The Netherlands to two filmmakers from Amsterdam, promised that it would reconnect people across a war-torn region by combining video correspondence, a documentary series, and Internet-enabled interaction. Although the extent of good actually done in this respect was very limited, Videoletters nonetheless succeeded in communicating do-gooding. The chapter demonstrates how the project’s presumed communicative power to reunite former enemies operated in Western circles. The documentary film sector praised it; journalists framed it as a success; and scholars adopted the positive news coverage Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 10 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner to quote the project as a good example. Donors, in turn, used the news coverage as proof of the value of their investment. For them, Videoletters was a hybrid from the outset, with funding earmarked both for doing good and for communicating the enterprise as positive. Partly because of the positive publicity achieved, the project’s failure on the ground remained out of sight. In Chapter 2, “‘Doing good’ and ‘looking good’ in global humanitarian reporting: is philanthro-journalism good news?”, Martin Scott, Kate Wright, and Mel Bunce report on a multi-method study of the humanitarian news agency IRIN. Conducted during a period of organisational transition, the study identified tensions between the agency’s journalistic work, aimed at doing good, and its funder’s motivation to accrue symbolic capital by supporting a good cause. In 2015, IRIN went from being funded for 19 years by its creator, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), to receiving support for 11 months from the Jynwel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of a Hong Kong-based private equity investment firm. The chapter analyses the interrelationship between IRIN’s mission to deliver “public service” humanitarian news and Jynwel’s presupposed intention to look good by saving it from closure. While Jynwel insisted on maximizing visibility and audience reach in order to generate revenues, IRIN’s staff, weary of the Foundation’s potential influence in editorial decision-making, negotiated the nature and extent of certain changes proposed by the funder from a journalistic logic. In this context, Jewel’s observable influence over IRIN’s work was limited. Ben Wilson’s Chapter 3, “Shifting development discourses in public and in private: the case of the Scotland-Malawi partnership”, analyses the efforts of a large civil society stakeholder to advance an approach to bilateral relationships based on mutual reciprocity rather than hierarchical charity. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of the Scotland Malawi Partnership (SMP), a community-based network of organisations funded by the Scottish government that represents more than 1,000 member organisations, the chapter identifies gaps between practitioners’ discourses and actions, and moreover between their public and private discourses. Shifts in discourses depend on varying interpretations of what will look good to different audiences. In this context, the SMP’s efforts to institute partnership as “good development” are constrained by the lasting impact of charity approaches on public discourses. Chapter 4 closes this first part. In “Communicating about development and the challenge of doing well: donor branding in the West Bank”, Karin Wilkins distinguishes between bilateral agencies’ work to do good and their responsibility to do well, arguing that efforts to brand their doing good interfere with due attention to their accountability for doing well. Based on an ethnographic walk along the cities of Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank, and attentive to the intricacies of foreign intervention in the Palestinian territories, the chapter maps a series of donor plaques situated in public places to mark instances of good work done. Taking into account how these plaques look, what they say, where they are placed, and to which donor they belong, the chapter analyses critically what they Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 11 signify in terms of the problems addressed, the solutions proposed, and the types of intervention foregrounded by the various donors, as well as issues of competition versus collaboration among them. The chapter serves a stark reminder of the materiality of communicative practices that may seem outdated to digital natives, but are still systematically used by bilateral agencies to highlight their do-gooding in conflict zones. What next? Rethinking conventional approaches Part II introduces four contributions that reflect upon a range of practices managed or underpinned by multilateral and bilateral agencies. These chapters consider how to improve the substance and the quality of communication work in development, drawing largely on action-research and practitioners’ expertise and reflection. In Chapter 5, “Becoming visible: an institutional histories approach to understanding practices and tensions in communication for development”, Jessica Noske-Turner, Jo Tacchi, and Vinod Pavarala analyse the institutional constraints faced by communication for development (C4D) teams within multilateral agencies. Based on findings from a collaborative research project with UNICEF, the chapter analyses how C4D teams struggle to find a balance between fulfilling their mission and securing internal and external recognition for their work. In an institutional context concerned with producing tangible outcomes that will look good to decision-makers, various factors obstruct the viability of C4D work. The chapter demonstrates that the long-held view that intra-agency C4D teams tend to fall prey to public relation units may not be the main problem at stake, identifying instead the imperative to be visible as a more significant risk. The authors signal the continued need to generate reliable evidence of the contribution of C4D work to sustainable development aimed at key decision-makers within and outside agencies, and call attention to the operational instability derived from teams’ inability to administer their budgets to that effect. Chapter 6, “For celebrity communication about development to do good: reframing purpose and discourse”, by Lauren Kogen, draws on a critical discourse analysis of TV appearances by George Clooney and Angelina Jolie on behalf of the UN between 2001 and 2017 to establish a distinction between communication about development that does harm, and communication about development that does good. Going beyond the analysis of how UN-driven communication about development looks superficially good by engaging celebrities for show, the chapter makes a concrete proposal towards how it may do good if reframed within an understanding of both the multilateral agency and these Hollywood stars as powerful communicators with ethical responsibilities for the messages they disseminate. In this way, it adds political value to the consideration of the representational quality of celebrity intervention in the development arena. In Chapter 7, “Communication and evaluation: can a decision-making hybrid reframe an age-old dichotomy?”, Ricardo Ramírez and Wendy Quarry propose a reflexive turn on the practice of communication for development, looking Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 12 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner critically at how they had previously understood the relationship between participatory communication and public relations in their professional work, and incorporating attention to evaluation. Based on the practical wisdom achieved through an action research project that they designed and implemented for the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the authors address the push-and-pull between evaluation and communication in a pragmatic way, identifying synergies between them. The chapter puts forward a multi-purpose understanding of the role of communication in development, defining hybridity as a rich quality, and illustrates the positive outcomes of a collaborative approach to the strategic planning of the evaluation and communication components of donor-driven initiatives. Chapter 8, “Communicating development results in an emerging ‘post-aid’ era”, by Peter da Costa, closes this part by reflecting on the nature and the future of the communication of results in the context of the changing architecture of global development governance after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda. Understood as a pragmatic combination of elements of communication for and about development, public information about results is considered from the perspective of a necessary shift from the attribution of success to solo stakeholders to a focus on collaborative contributions to shared goals. The chapter identifies communicative opportunities and threats arising from the SDGs for different stakeholders across scales of governance, arguing for a convergence approach to communication and media practices in order to meet the challenge of doing good with the greatest impact possible. By way of conclusion: emerging themes We opened this introductory chapter with the argument that understanding the link between doing good and looking good is crucial because their overlap may lead to democratic deficits concerning citizens’ rights – to substantial communication and to sustainable development – across both ends of the donor–recipient equation. The chapters in this collection adapt and refine the conceptualisation of what it is to do good in international development in connection with communication and media in various ways, demonstrating that, in order to interrogate practices, we must begin by clarifying the rights and responsibilities at stake. In particular, the chapters by Enghel, Wilson, Wilkins, and Kogen identify ethical tensions where stakeholders’ motives overlap, calling attention to the instrumental value of appearing to be doing good vis-à-vis mainstream perceptions (instead, da Costa argues, thought-provokingly, that communication must lead to good development but also maximise the impact of this good-doing). Enghel, Wilkins, and Kogen also point at political responsibilities and democratic risks by identifying ways in which bilateral and multilateral agencies fulfil promotional goals by positioning themselves as good-doers without accounting for the actual impact of their interventions on the ground, or on their target audiences. The structures within which decisions regarding doing good and looking good take place have so far remained largely invisible in research, and the chapters by Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 13 Scott et al. and by Noske-Turner et al. make a significant contribution towards demonstrating that in-depth studies within those structures are both doable and productive. Enghel adds to these contributions by linking a high-profile intervention that appeared to be driven by independents to the bilateral stakeholders that mandated and support it. Ramírez and Quarry add detail by pointing out that there is a question mark over the sustainability of their innovative solutions to the tension between doing good and showing good (via the communication of adequate evaluation), given recurrent changes in the internal organisation of IDRC. Sustainability is linked not only to the characteristics of organisational structures, but also to issues of funding, whether directly or indirectly. Scott et al. and Noske-Turner et al. note that it may have a direct bearing on the survival and freedom to act of organisations and teams, calling attention to the need to keep the matter under careful observation. More obliquely, Kogen considers the poor ethico-political quality of the high-impact appearances by rich and famous celebrities sponsored by the UN, and Wilkins argues that bilateral donors favour allocations with an obvious material weight, and therefore easy to brand, at the expense of consulting communities about their priority needs. Underlying questions regarding the rationales for spending decisions and the (im)balances between initiatives to do good and to foster do-gooding would merit further investigation. While the rules of the game imposed by large structures point at the weakness of efforts aimed at deploying communication to do good as a stable organisational component, the chapters also show that shared team histories go some way towards facilitating resilience in the face of unstable conditions. This is the case for the humanitarian news agency IRIN as demonstrated by Scott et al., for some of the UNICEF C4D teams discussed by Noske-Turner et al., and for expert practitioners Ramírez and Quarry, who draw not only on their extensive individual experience but also on their long-standing collaboration. More macro-structural factors are highlighted by Wilson, who points at the pervasive endurance of traditional understandings of development-as-charity as a factor that constrains efforts to do development better. Wilson makes a novel contribution to the analysis of development practices with communication as a lens by identifying shifts in the discourses of practitioners depending on which audiences they are addressing (an issue also raised in passing by Enghel in her chapter). His findings call attention to a performatic dimension of development work that resonates with Erving Goffman’s theoretical work, inviting further elaboration. This leads us to the last emerging theme that we want to highlight here. The chapters by Enghel, Wilson, Noske-Turner et al., Ramírez and Quarry, and da Costa, strongly suggest that where a concern with looking good prevails (regardless of its various motivations), specific audiences are in focus, and that identifying those audiences helps unravel the question raised by Waisbord in his epilogue: can looking good be done better? As this collection demonstrates, the answer to that question will depend on the combination of various factors: structural issues having to do with funding rationales and organisational setups, policy and management Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) 14 Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske-Turner decisions linked to funding, collaborative opportunities to reflect about practices and strategies (or the lack of them), and issues of democratic regulation and accountability – understood as a governmental responsibility of stakeholders, and not as an accounting exercise. Moreover, this collection indicates that the answer to Waisbord’s question seems to depend on clarifying the audiences addressed when communicating for and about development, and the purposes that drive those practices. This insight brings to mind Bella Mody’s decisive appeal from 1992: “Begin with the audience” (Mody 1992). The question, then, becomes: what are the audiences of international development cooperation nowadays? In the context of a yet emerging post-aid system, and more widely of neoliberal digital capitalism, we must revisit the methodological and analytical strategies required to answer it. Notes 1 Be them more specific, such as journalists, public sector officers, or intra-organisation decision-makers, or wider, such as a global news market. 2 “Practitioners” refers here not to individuals, but to the professional practice at large in the context of the institutional project of development communication. See Enghel (2015, 13–15). 3 Wilkins (2016, 5–6) discusses The Narrative Project as a multi-partner initiative driven by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the public perception of development in donor countries and counter the idea that aid is wasted. 4 An example of a straightforward public relations campaign is the 2015 European Year for Development, established “to showcase Europe’s commitment to eradicating poverty worldwide and to inspire more Europeans to get engaged and involved in development”. See https://europa.eu/eyd2015/en/content/about-2015 [accessed 22 November 2016]. 5 See Hodges and McGrath (2011) for a rare exception: a public relations study that focuses on community communication. 6 Available online at www.oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/34428351.pdf [accessed 7 December 2017]. 7 How to best name the field remains a matter of debate. See Enghel (2015, 11) for a discussion. 8 At least until 2014, when the 13th Round Table was held. See www.unesco.org/new/ en/communication- and- information/media- development/communication- forsustainable- development/un- inter- agency- round- table- on- communication- fordevelopment/ [accessed 7 December 2017]. 9 As well as confusion over how to understand and implement communication for development vis-à-vis public relations or dissemination. 10 The OECD, an international economic organisation that “brings around its table 40 countries that account for 80% of world trade and investment”, sets the rules for the monitoring and evaluation of international development cooperation – and therefore for donor-driven allocations for communication – with a focus on results-based management. According to the OECD’s own data, most communication departments within development cooperation agencies focus their investment on educating donor publics about development or convincing them that aid is working (da Costa 2009), but which proportion of those allocations is directed to communication for and about development communication intervention is unknown, because the aid statistics collated by the Organization do not detail specific expenditures. As a consequence, it is difficult to compare and analyse trends in spending or approaches (González Cahuapé-Casaux and Kalatil 2015). Florencia Enghel Application for Docent (November 2018) Introduction 15 11 In this introductory chapter, communication in international development is understood as multi-scalar, and generally mediated by media. In this perspective, the media are distinct from, but closely related to, processes of communication. See Enghel (2014, 92–5) for a more detailed discussion. 12 Theories of practice have arisen within the social sciences from efforts to conceptualise the relationship between agency and structure. The debate about the relative power of structure over agency and vice versa remains complicated and far from being settled, but attention to practice is nonetheless understood to have potential for unraveling aspects of social change (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; McLeod and Thomson 2009). 13 The book referred to in Wilkins’ quote, Doing good or doing better: Development policies in a globalizing world (Kremer, van Lieshout, and Went 2009), includes a chapter by van Tulder and Fortainer (2009, 223–4) that discusses corporate responsibility in development as “doing well by doing good” in connection with the ethics of cooperating with other stakeholders based on the dialogic negotiation of solutions. 14 The report refers to communication about development in recipient countries only, under the category of public diplomacy, which is defined as “the promotion of a country’s […] aid development policy by informing and influencing the foreign audience through the media. 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