Communication is essential to making biotechnology and genomics relevant to developing countries and poor people. Few would disagree with that. But many are sceptical about public relations efforts to impose inappropriate technological ‘solutions’ on developing countries. This paper is a partial reflection on how PR and advocacy ‘mixes’ can be understood and whether they can be useful to innovation in developing country contexts.
This paper has several aims: First to consider why communication has become more important in the area of innovation and development; Second, we look at how two biotechnology related public-private partnerships have used public relations and advocacy to further innovation in development and pose some questions about complicated aspects of communication, technological innovation and development. We suggest that it is increasingly difficult to classify communication efforts associated with technology for development initiatives as PR or advocacy or according to the preconceived notions about who the messenger might be; Third we look at some of the methodological and theoretical implications of the analysis. Discourse analysis, which encourages us to unwrap layers of meaning in the text but which often treats texts in the abstract, unrelated to broader institutional developments or to ‘evidence’ of any kind, is of limited help in achieving a more grounded analysis of communication efforts. Communication and voice are essential ‘capabilities’ in development and we suggest that we need a more sophisticated approach to thinking about communication capabilities as technical, and social and political.
Lancée par le président brésilien Lula au début des années 2000, Fome Zero est une stratégie globale de lutte contre la faim, intégrant un ensemble de programmes publics d’accès à l’alimentation, de soutien à l’agriculture familiale et de développement d’activités...
Cette étude a été menée dans le cadre du projet PAEPARD ou Plateforme pour un partenariat Afrique-Europe dans le domaine de la recherche agricole pour le développement, projet financé à 80% par la Commission européenne avec pour objectif de consolider...
This paper was prepared to present at the Farmer First Revisited: 20 Years On conference at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, December, 2007. Its focus is the challenge of strengthening agricultural innovation systems. The paper prefaces...
The paper takes a critical look at two key interventions identified to deliver the PAEPARD capacity strengthening strategy. Firstly, the training of a pool of agricultural innovation facilitators (AIF) to broker relations between relevant stakeholders for the consolidation of effective...
Ce document analyse de façon critique deux interventions majeures identifiées pour mettre en œuvre la stratégie de renforcement des capacités de PAEPARD. La première intervention est la formation d’un vivier de facilitateurs de l’innovation agricole (FIA) pour assurer une médiation...