The idea that development needs a good dose of an entrepreneurial spirit is seemingly everywhere. It is promoted by tech and business sector celebrities, foundations and philanthropies, as well as government donors, UN agencies, governments and local NGOs. These new (and not so new) gurus suggest that development should be more lean and agile, requiring creative, innovative, and bold leaders (often termed ‘changemakers’), who use the logics of business and capital to generate alternative financing steams, greater autonomy and increased efficiencies.
But promoting these ideals as the solution to development has several, more subtle effects. These narratives frame ‘traditional’ development as slow, bureaucratic, old fashioned, (financially) unsustainable and as having failed. It also has the effect of turning the idea of precarity (short-term projects, risk, experimentation) into something desirable.
My article published today in the International Journal of Communication (which is open access) asks what these shifts mean for the field of media and communication for development and social change in particular. I refer to this integration of entrepreneurial discourses as ‘communication for social changemaking’. As part of the research I analysed over 80 working papers and programme documents from the field, honing in on six key cases for in depth study.
The research found that the uptake of ideas of entrepreneurialism and changemaking influences the meanings of communication. In communication for development and social change, communication is sometimes thought about as about message delivery. Or, when influenced by more participatory theories, it may be thought about as a process of horizontal dialogue and debate. My analysis found that under the influence of entrepreneurial ideals, there tends to be an emphasis the role of communication in leadership, where charismatic leaders should be good communicators who inspire and mobilise for change. Hero narratives around changemakers and leaders are packaged into neat stories. We also see more emphasis on mobilising communities, or in the context of media (including community media), mobilising audiences into communities of followers or subscribers both for change and for income generation.
The research also finds a significant shift in what is implied by social change and development, as an outcome of entrepreneurial communication. Firstly, social change comes to be about big ideas, creativity, boldness, fun, and optimism. Youth are presented as being hungry for change, and we also see excitement around possible new business models for media and other opportunities for change. This contrasts starkly with a more political, structural and critical understanding of social change as being about political resistance, struggle and structural change. Secondly, social change tends to be thought about as a process that begins with fast ideas that are tested and then scaled up, but at the same time avoiding massification and centralised control. Thirdly, autonomy, self-reliance, and self-determination are key to the goal of social change. For example, edutainment has been used to model entrepreneurialism amongst youth, so that they might be encouraged to be ‘economically empowered’. Here, the obstacles and difficulties they face are implied to be because of a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and not because of the structural inequalities they face under global capitalism. Local NGOs, too, are made to be responsible for finding creative sources of alternative funding in order to be self-reliant, despite operating in much lower resource settings compared with the foundations, celebrities and others promoting these solutions.
However, in my article while critiquing the problematic aspects of the shifts, I am also cautious about immediately writing off all these ideas. It is important not to romanticise the status quo – ‘traditional development’ – which for decades has been critiqued as top-down, prescriptive, constrained, precarious and short-term, inflexible, accountability-driven, and neo-colonial. My current research is therefore collaborating with practitioners and communities to critically reflect on the entrepreneurial discourses and how they are influencing their work, but also to explore how we balance the desire for greater strategic and financial autonomy with commitments to collective action, solidarity, and social justice. I hope to explore how organizations have or could appropriate ‘communication for social changemaking’ to retain core social justice values that are fundamental to this field.
This post is a summary of the following article:
Noske-Turner, J. (2023). Communication for Social Changemaking: A “New Spirit” in Media and Communication for Development and Social Change?. International Journal Of Communication, 17, 23. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/18759