There is consensus in the development communication field about community participation
being a holistic approach required to address social development challenges. Participatory
development, also known as another development, is considered invaluable in the social
change process. While participatory principles have enjoyed increasing influence over the
work of development organisations, there is still confusion as to what participation really is
and how it must be applied as an approach to social change. As a result, development in
(marginalized) communities has remained what I would call a Sisyphean task despite
tremendous funding and effort that is being put towards development. This study is motivated
by three factors relating to the practical and theoretical issues characterising participation.
First is the acknowledged lack of a consistent definition as well as inconsistencies
characterising the application of participation. The second factor is the contention that
participation has remained under theorised and the third is what can be arguably conceived as
the influence of stakeholder theory on development communication discourse. The focus of
this study is how a theory commonly used in the strategic communication field, the
stakeholder theory, applies to deliberate development communication efforts, particularly
how the theory sheds light on the concept of participation. It introduces and examines the
relevance of Edward Freeman‘s (1984) stakeholder theory in defining and applying
participation in social change initiatives. Three development agents namely OneVoice South
Africa (OVSA), The Valley Trust (TVT) and Drama for Aids Education (DramAidE) are
used as a case study of the concept of participation. The study begins with a critical
exploration of the complex participatory communication for social change narrative
discussing key ontological and epistemological assumptions as well as a pastiche of
approaches often reified as participation. It goes on to present a comprehensive review of the
stakeholder theory and its critique, followed by an exploration of how the three development
agents develop, implement and manage their respective participatory programmes. It
concludes by applying stakeholder theory to the analysis of these programmes to determine
whether the theory can be conceived as an accurate descriptive tool of the participation
process and if its normative tenets are valid to the process. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/7980 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Musara, Lubombo. |
| Contributors | Caldwell, Marc Anthony., Tomaselli, Keyan G. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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