Terms for Strat Comm
From Strategic Communication for Strategic Development: A conceptual overview (BMZ, 2010)
| Awareness-raising: “Sensual experiences bound to spiritual intuitive learning processes can trigger emotional involvement. The understanding of awareness-raising is strongly overlapping with on-formal education and communication. Term is often used when it is not clear what the problems, solutions, and the messages are.” |
| Civil Society Mobilization: “Participation by local residents and stakeholders changes policy. It also makes policy more likely to be effective. Communication and education techniques can enhance the effectiveness of people or groups seeking to participate. People’s participation not only improves the program and adds credibility, but also strengthens their skills to do similar work in the future. A general increase in ‘bargaining power’ via communicative, social, and political competence is needed. A lot of intermediary institutions like NGOs shifted from ‘information diffusion’ to and for people to ‘information seeking’ by and with people.” |
| Communication: “Dialogue, enabling people to understand the key factors of their physical, social, economic, and political environment and their interdependence so that rising problems can be solved competently. Since Aristotle scholars fought over ‘vertical’ (dominant) and ‘horizontal’ (democratic) models. Communication by definition incorporates feedback. Information does not. Hence, communication is the transmission belt between information dissemination and action planning.” |
| Conflict Management: “CM is designed as an alternative policy instrument, offering ways to build consensus and convergence in situations of open conflict and conflictive decision-making processes. The use of CM is frequently required for specific aspects of StratComm, especially processes of social communication – promoting dialogue, reflection, participatory situation analysis, consensus-building, decision-making and action planning for change and development among people and institutions on different levels.” |
| Development Communication: “DevComm as a field was set up in the early 1960’s and first applied to ‘nation building’, rural development, agricultural extension, health and sanitation, as well as family planning. It is the planned use of communication processes and the media products to support effective policymaking, public participation and project implementation geared towards social, economic, political, and ecological development. It is a two-way social interaction process enabling the people concerned to understand key factors and their interdependencies and to respond to problems in a competent way. DevComm aims not so much at information dissemination as at a shared vision of a sustainable future and at capacity building in social groups to solve or prevent rising problems.” |
| Environmental Communication: “EnvCom, came up in the mid-1990s as a result of the Rio Conference. It is a management tool in policymaking and project management. It is the missing link between the subject matter of environmental issues and the related social-political processes. As such, it bridges ‘hard’ technical know-how and ‘soft’ action-oriented practice change. Embedded in a well-defined communication strategy, EnvComm makes efficient use of methods, instruments and techniques which are well established in development communication, adult education, social marketing, agricultural extension, public relations, non-formal training and other fields.” |
| Environmental Education: “EE is a process of developing a world population that is aware of and concerned about the total environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations and commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones. Social groups learn from each other as they consider the options to the future. Critical to education for sustainable development is learning to access and influence systems for public participation for decision-making.” |
| Formal Education: “Factual knowledge on physical, chemical and biological inter-relationships of complex natural systems, and their reactions to human interventions at a local, regional, and global scare are taught in class, i.e. in schools, universities, etc. Seen as a long-term investment in future generations.” |
| Social Marketing: “Social marketing, often an element of DevComm, builds on diffusion of innovation and behavior change models. Agricultural extension first discovered in the 1960s that social change always went through distinct phases: awareness – interest – evaluation – trial – adoption or rejection. Social marketing focuses on marketing techniques such as market segmentation and formative research to maximize the effectiveness of interventions.” |
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