I went to New York with a colleague last week to visit the Open Society Institute (OSI). At CommGAP we are always seeking to win friends and influence networks. We met the Open Society Justice Initiative team. It was a useful and productive meeting. In the course of it, we were given books and reports about the work of the Justice Initiative and OSI generally. This is what happens when you visit organizations working in development: they give you their stuff to read. We do it too. Most of the publications you are asked to take home with you are things you probably will not touch once they find a place of honor on your bookshelf. Of course you intend to read them all; it is just that you hardly ever do.
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Now, it is well-known that the problem of politicized ethnicity bedevils quite a few developing countries. Less well known is the peculiar challenge that this problem poses for governance reform. I will use an example that I know well but disguise the name of the country.
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To me the training pointed out and the comments reinforced the perspective that the role communication plays in the reforms is equal to or greater than the policy work, yet the funding and support for governments in the area of communication or to make sure that the reforms get implemented is virtually nonexistent. Posted under:
What follows is a discussion of two of the many challenges that often bedevil efforts to bring out pro-poor social and political change and an approach that is a way of dealing with them. You know the deal: well-meaning technocrats try to introduce a bit of governance reform...by stealth. Then it runs into trouble- usually due to vigorous attacks by vested interests likely to lose out if the reform succeeds - yet the potential beneficiaries are not organized, do not even know that they might benefit from the reform. And so the reformers are defeated. Or the reform, if it has already been introduced, is reversed or stalls. The problem is that many technical specialists are uncomfortable with the public sphere and all it entails: people, the media, controversy and debate, 'noise'. But unsupported reforms tend to become orphans and street urchins. |
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In my last post, I discussed one of the supreme values undergirding the democratic public sphere: the public use of reason, that is, a commitment to reason, to argumentation, and the possibility of agreement. I discussed the threat posed to that value and the possibilities of the public sphere if claims are based on the supposed demands of a Deity. But irrationality in the public sphere comes from another source as well: the loud and insistent claims of ethnic champions in complex, multiethnic polities.
I sat down the other day with a group of specialists from a Country Team within the World Bank. We were discussing efforts to improve the governance system in that country and how a Program like ours - 
CommGap held a 3-day training program for senior government official undertaking reform programs on the role communication and participation can play in their reforms. Thirty government officials from 15 countries in Africa and Asia participated. The value of a group like this is that they offer real world experiences in having undertaken reforms that have been successful or have failed and can offer lessons on what needs to be done to make reforms happen.
