Communication in International Development: Doing Good or Looking Good?

Description

International development stakeholders harness communication with two broad purposes: to do good, via communication for development and media assistance, and to communicate do-gooding, via public relations and information. This book unpacks various ways in which different efforts to do good are combined with attempts to look good, be it in the eyes of donor constituencies at large, or among more specific audiences, such as journalists or intra-agency decision-makers. Development communication studies have tended to focus primarily on interventions aimed at doing good among recipients, at the expense of examining the extent to which promotion and reputation management are elements of those practices. This book establishes the importance of interrogating the tensions generated by overlapping uses of communication to do good and to look good within international development cooperation. The book is a critical text for students and scholars in the areas of development communication and international development and will also appeal to practitioners working in international aid who are directly affected by the challenges of communicating for and about development. Contents List of figures List of table and box Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction. Communication in international development: towards theorizing across hybrid practices • Florencia Enghel and Jessica Noske- Turner Part I: “For” and “about”: interrogating practices across domains 1 A “success story” unpacked: doing good and communicating do-gooding in the Videoletters Project • Florencia Enghel 2 “Doing good” and “looking good” in global humanitarian reporting: is philanthro-journalism good news? • Martin Scott, Kate Wright and Mel Bunce 3 Shifting development discourses in public and in private: the case of the Scotland–Malawi partnership • Ben Wilson 4 Communication about development and the challenge of doing well: donor branding in the West Bank • Karin Gwinn Wilkins Part II: What next? Rethinking conventional approaches 5 Becoming visible: an institutional histories approach to understanding the practices and tensions in communication for development • Jessica Noske-Turner, Jo Tacchi and Vinod Pavarala 6 For celebrity communication about development to do good: reframing purpose and discourses • Lauren Kogen 7 Communication and evaluation: can a decision-making hybrid reframe an age-old dichotomy? • Ricardo Ramírez and Wendy Quarry 8 Communicating development results in an emerging “post-aid” era • Peter da Costa Epilogue: what’s bad about “looking good”? Can it be done better? • Silvio Waisbord Index