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Blog 2: Communication Policies at Different Levels: International, Regional, National, and Local

Communication policies exist at multiple levels - international, regional, national, and local. They aim to coordinate communication systems and avoid contradictions between public and private entities. While many African countries have policies for specific sectors like education and health, some exist more on paper than in practice. An effective communication policy can consolidate actions across sectors and support the systematic planning and use of communication resources to enhance national development.

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Tzeri Vicente
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62 views

Blog 2: Communication Policies at Different Levels: International, Regional, National, and Local

Communication policies exist at multiple levels - international, regional, national, and local. They aim to coordinate communication systems and avoid contradictions between public and private entities. While many African countries have policies for specific sectors like education and health, some exist more on paper than in practice. An effective communication policy can consolidate actions across sectors and support the systematic planning and use of communication resources to enhance national development.

Uploaded by

Tzeri Vicente
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Blog 2: Communication Policies at Different Levels: International, Regional,

National, and Local

The relationship between information flows and national or local-level


development have become better understood in recent years; as has the role of
communication processes in mediating social and individual change. However, in most
African countries these relationships are not widely discussed or easily accepted,
especially by development planners. Basically, communication is a social process that
produces changes in the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of individuals, and
groups, through providing factual and technical information, through motivational or
persuasive messages, and through facilitating the learning process and social
environment. These results might then lead to increase in the mastery of crucial skills by
the individual, and to enhancing the achievement of various instrumental goals. Other
possible consequences of communication include enhancement in self-esteem and
wellbeing through participation in community and social life, increasing the individual’s
perceived efficacy in dealing with other people, reinforcing mutual respect and
enhancing confidence among social groups and building trust within communities.
These outcomes are the ingredients that contribute to the creation of those positive
individual, community and societal changes that together are often referred to as
development. Communication can thus positively influence development. But using
communication for development means different things to different people. It has even
been viewed differently in different eras, considered variously as social engineering or
giving voice to the voiceless. Both as idea and as practice, the relationship of
communication to development has been problematic, as it has raised many questions.
Government and other institutions create policies to ensure coherence and to
avoid contradictions in the actions of various public and private entities. Policy
instruments also seek to solve social and technical problems and to legitimise the
implementation of programs and projects. African countries are not strangers to policy-
making. Most countries already have policies in various sectors; some of them well
articulated, for example, an economic policy, a health policy, an agricultural policy, an
educational policy, an environmental policy and a foreign policy. In some countries
these are merely cosmetic documents virtually moribund, with no living dynamic reality,
and not much possibility of being implemented. In other countries these policies provide
sectoral orientations that can contribute to the overall goals of national development. In
that context, a communication policy may be seen as a further contribution to the
national development environment through consolidating actions around issues that cut
across several sectors.
As far as communication policies are concerned, they have been described as:
Sets of principles and norms established to guide the behaviour of communication
systems. They are shaped over time in the context of society’s general approach to
communication and to the media. Emanating from political ideologies, the social and
economic conditions of the country and the values on which they are based, they strive
to relate these to the real needs for and the prospective opportunities for
communication. In every society, public and private institutions and individuals
undertake internal and external communication for many reasons. There is often no
over-arching idea or vision to help coordinate or rationalise these various actions,
probably because policy-makers and planners do not see how they can be related.
In the past year, there has been much debate about campaigning for a ‘New
Settlement’ (Clarke and Woodhead 2015) for religious education in England, which
would involve a change to the law and national policy. The debate has been informed
by two further important reports and an edited book all underlining the need for
improved ‘religious literacy’ in both schools and public life (CORAB 2015; Dinham and
Francis 2015; Dinham and Shaw 2015). Main issues currently being discussed in
relation to religious education are whether religious education would be better with a
statutory national curriculum rather than being organised locally as at present, with non-
statutory national guidance; whether the parental right of withdrawal should be
abolished; the place of non-religious worldviews in examination syllabuses and more
generally and whether the name of the subject should be changed. There is a strong
lobby arguing that the local organisation has broken down because of changes in local
government funding and in the way many state-funded schools are now free from local
authority control (‘Academies’ and ‘Free Schools’). A statutory national-level curriculum
could strengthen the subject and make things simpler for all concerned. On the other
hand, there is the danger of losing the grass-roots input and valuable relationships as
well as professional development built up at local level as teachers, local politicians and
religious communities worked together on a local Agreed Syllabus and in local Standing
Advisory Councils on Religious Education. Even if the ‘religious education community’
agrees on the best way forward, we then have to persuade government to make the
required changes. The Religious Education Council is about to launch a Commission to
look into all this.
Whatever the outcome, the case studies in this issue demonstrate that the best
of policy and curriculum guidelines national or local will only result in better religious
education if teachers are enabled to take ownership and put them into practice so the
most important way forward is to invest in teacher education, both initial training and
continued professional development.
A communication policy can, therefore, be an instrument for supporting the
systematic planning, development and use of the communication system, and its
resources and possibilities, and for ensuring that they function efficiently in enhancing
national development.

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