The Strategic Politics of Participatory Communication

Abstract

This chapter dissects the relationship between communication for development and social change (CDSC) and strategic communication (SC). It makes a call to reassess SC from a perspective that places communication and collective action at the center of social change. The author argues that insights from SC need to be incorporated in a participatory perspective that links communication, collective action, and politics. A first step to reconsider SC in CDSC is to parse two meanings of “social” in social change: social as “what” changes and social as “how” change happens. Social change reflects the activation of institutional and social networks to promote transformations at individual, community and structural levels. The chapter discusses strategic issues from a perspective that foregrounds strategic collective action in CDSC: problem definition, goal selection, strategic junctures, tactics, and motivations for change.

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