Participatory Approach

The participatory approach is one of the most common concepts of theorizing and practice in development communication. Within the emergence of “new social movements,” such as the growing body of research from various transdisciplinary, Wilkins (2000) warns of development communication’s social relevance as a field of study and practice. 

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The increasing advancement in communication technologies that have influenced traditional institutions’ social and political, and economic pertinence of development communication theory and practice has been questioned (Huesca, 2001). 

Furthermore, Huesca argues that (2001: 415) the evolution of the development communication theory and its emergence of the pluralism paradigm has triggered a heated discussion among development communication scholars and “have clouded the direction for future conceptual advancement.”

The unstoppable social movements that could provide a theoretical ground for developing communication scholarship should have developed as guidance and commend to evolving new social trends. These new characters and an understanding of contemporary social activities have helped renew consensual interest in specific aspects of participatory development approaches. 

In responding towards changing the landscape of development communication context, the development communication scholars should establish a new strategy by redirecting its attention and accommodating new social movements by combining them with relevant areas from participatory approach to development communication research (Huesca, 2001).

The massive contemporary transformation in social reality, which has impacted the development communication field’s research and practice, invites the development communication scholars to re-conceptualize their research methods. The development of communication scholars and practitioners, for instance, should shift the attention from state projects and significant media interventions toward the grassroots initiative. 

The scholar’s academic efforts should incorporate the conceptual ground of these new features into their research endeavors. They should consider adopting “the physical junctions, hybrid zones, and global cities where transnational capitals intersect with reterritorialized subjects who are amenable to new nations of community, expectations, and entitlement” (Huesca, 2001, p. 428).

By capturing those contextual shifts, the development communication scholars must have to be far more “flexible and contingent in their descriptions, explanations, and prescriptions for interventions of scholarship, theories, and field practices” (Huesca, 2001, p., 428). 

In turn, the participatory approach in development communication should attend to temporal dimensions more systematically in research and practice, by, for instance, incorporating the ebb and flow of action characteristics of deinstitutionalized and grassroots level context into development theory and practice. 

This initiative will help change the design and study of development communication that might be more sporadic, multi-focused, and cyclical to align themselves to the lifeworld’s rhythm reflected in new social movements (Huesca, 2001).

Further, Huesca (2001, 429) argues that incorporating the “importance of understanding the process of identity formation in action” is another critical dimension that draws from new social movements that participatory approach in development communication should accommodate. 

To respond to this challenge, the development communication scholars could have established a methodology based on a dialogic praxis that offers a promising mode of entree into the study of how social movements emerge and develop. 

Implementing a dialogical approach as its grounded methodology, the participatory approach in development communication allows incorporating all the concepts in the emerging framework/another development, including emerging from the new social movement.

This strategy enables all entities such as knowledge, power, people, local communities’ cultural identity, and leaders involved in developing development projects. This process not only creates equity but also, in the words of Paulo Freire, every person will be able to speak and take part not only the privileged, for the right to speak on their behalf” (cited in Servaes & Malikhao, 2002). 

In line with the local community participation in the development communication spectrum, Bessette (2003) specifies the particular character/steps of the participatory approach that is noteworthy. 

These include “establishing relationships with the local community and understanding local settings, involving the local community in identifying problems and solutions, identifying communication objectives, and identifying appropriate communication tools” (as cited in Torres and Manyoso, 2018, p. 6).

Another essential principle of the participatory approach should be to gain conceptual clarity, practical direction, and renewed relevance by drawing on new social movements’ scholarship contributions (Huesca, 2001). 

The characteristics changed in the global and local context caused by new social activities have provided pointers for developing and practicing communication scholarship. Focusing attention on the identities that emerge in action that affects social change invites participatory communication development researchers to play a central role in contributing to our understanding of them. 

Implementing this method would pave the way that communication researchers develop to theorize in the development of communication.