Interview with Guy Bessette

CI: Let's start with you telling us about some of the projects you are involved with and the processes that guide you in your work.

GB: Let me start with a learning and networking programme in what IDRC calls participatory development communication. This is a methodology that we use where communication is a support for community work.

The idea is to work with research teams made up of groups of people from academic and NGO backgrounds with an interest in Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) though not necessarily skills or experience at the community level. Experience working with communities is very important when providing support to community level natural resource management initiatives. People without these skills often come to communities with their own views and want to do research based on those views, but this doesn't work at all. You cannot have a group of people develop technologies or ideas and then try to transfer them to a community to use under their own community conditions. It simply doesn't work. So we bring the research teams together where they can learn to improve the way they work with communities. This is where the communication comes in, as a tool to do participatory development.

One of the experiments we are now trying is to look at how we can introduce research teams, NGOs, stakeholders - maybe from government technical services - associations, regional organisations etc. to issues and approaches connected to participatory communication to help improve their work with communities. But when you do a single workshop, people go away and get busy and forget about it. We are looking for a way to reach people in a sustainable way. It is in this sense that this programme is an experiment.

What we are trying now is a programme with face-to-face and distance activities carried out over 1 year. It should introduce people to the different thematic areas of work with communities and the use of communication. To begin this we asked around and found 3 teams willing to participate. The first is from Uganda, a classical research organisation doing communication work with small banana growers around issues related to the productivity of their land. The second team are practitioners in CBNRM from Cambodia. The third is a Vietnamese university team working with communities in the uplands.

Each group is quite different but willing to participate in a peer learning and reporting programme. They are not just participants but also people who can use their experience to make recommendations about this approach - how it can be opened up to other research teams and NGOs, and can it be shaped better? They are participants but also involved in the design.

CI: Is the Vietnam group working in the Hong Ha community process written up in - IDRC reports?

GB: Yes. It is a group from the University of Agriculture who work with Hong Ha and other minority communities in the uplands.

The way the programme works is that we arrive and introduce it to the participants. We have a week of discussions to negotiate agreement. Instead of doing a typical classical learning programme with the content and everything, what we do is to identify about 10 thematics — there is some content and some suggestions — but the core of it is the exchange of experiences and views by each team.

To ensure the exchange of experiences, each team has to have a mechanism to work together. Some, Cambodia for instance, can have up to 60 persons related to the team. Others may have only 20 but it is not only the researchers themselves it is also the others who support or help. They have to all get along, they have to be able to discuss things and then they have to be able to create a synthesis of it. This demands a lot of group work. We also have an electronic forum for each teams participants to air their views and react to the views of the other parties. As facilitators we also jump in to underline this or that point touched on by the discussion and to suggest readings and things like that.

So that's the way its working. It started in October 2001 and in February we will have a face-to-face workshop. After that people will apply what they've learned in the field and there will be a mechanism to discuss what has happened in the field and the forum will come together again after 1 year. So it's a mix like that.

We have a web site called - Isang Bagsak which is Pilipino for 'let's come together' or 'let's make an agreement'. The site presents our - approach, thematics, and resources. It also incorporates a forum that is only available for the people registered. This is because the process is experimental and we don't want people to be timid. If I say something and people all over the world can see what I say it can be intimidating.

So the approach that we use - participatory development communication - is really a methodological approach that invites people who work in research with communities in the field to start by building mutual understanding with the community. After that they develop the processes in which they will try to involve the participants in a discussion of the specific problem, its causes, consequences, and possible options or solutions. Most important, though, is to agree on the decision making process they can use to begin experimenting with solutions.

This is the first big step and then there are the regular steps like the identification of different stakeholders and groups on which to target the intervention, the development of the communication objectives and strategies that will be used to support the accompanying action and finally support for the accompanying initiatives.

There is a publication which can be accessed on the site called - Facilitating Stakeholder Participation Through Communication in Participatory Natural Resource Management Research: A Guide to Participatory Development Communication For Research Teams and Practitioners which acts as a guide to the process and looks at the learning and networking teams and explores issues like:

• what's the use of communication,
• how do you plan and approach a local community,
• how do you share information and why,
• how do you involve a community in identifying a problem in the decision making process,
• how do you develop communication strategy,
• how do you use communication tools,
• how do you evaluate a communication activity in a community context,
• how do you facilitate the sharing of knowledge,
• and how do you facilitate extension to other communities.

These are the things that integrate the parts – the research group and the development and communication strategy - so we've put it together.

This is not something we do all the time. We're just beginning. It gives you a sense of what we're trying to do why. We'll see, in a year, what people say. If it's been effective in the work people do with communities. That is one example.

Another programme I have been involved with is a collaborative programme with the L'Agence de la Francophonie. They have implemented 200 rural centres in Africa for promoting reading and social activities in communities. The centres have books and places to read. There's electricity, often solar power and games for the young to play. They are also community centres where people can come and talk about things like family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention or take literacy classes. In many centres they have a television out and many people come and watch. They are really gathering places.

This programme has been working for more than 10 years. At the beginning, when we were doing the research with them, they were trying to see if they could go beyond being just a centre for reading and gathering. They wanted to investigate what they could do to support development. They didn't know exactly how to reflect on that. We had discussions – really an action research project - to see if the centres could use development communication methodology to support community initiatives. We put together a first draft of that programme and then sent it around to 23 of the centres who were interested. We had a lot of meetings with them and developed a design which they implemented over 3 years. They began by identifying the problems that their communities wanted to work on. It was not us who said what to work on. If the issue is how to support community initiative that is going to improve the life of the community - then choose your own priority, so they did.

There was research action in using communication to support literacy for some groups, others aimed to clean the market and find solutions to garbage problems, others were to train fisherman's wives to knit bags to earn a second income when their husbands were at sea, others were more the natural resource management type of things. One which was very interesting was aimed at reviving old customs, old dances and songs on the verge of being lost because people were dying and the young were deserting the community. The communities chose a vast array of problematics.

So what we tried to do was capacity building for the animators of the centres by setting out a simple methodology to support their work. It is basically the same thing that we have already discussed but for another context. We prepared a little guide for them to use in their work. After that we published a case study on the 23 experiments and discussed what the key issues were in such a venture.

It's clear that half of the 23, in the 3 years, were not very good. But even if they were not very good, from the stand-point of having a specific impact, there was a lot to learn from them. Things not to do, and difficulties that people, who are not trained in communication encounter when they try to do such a thing. Because we are not all in the community and communication business, we think that it all goes along concretely but it is very abstract. It is important that local practitioners, who are based on the field, acquire the skills to use communication as a tool to foster change in the community.

Often what we see is practitioners coming from the city and the big NGOs or from big technical extension services, who go to the village, do some activity and go back to where they came from. So it's not indigenous at all. I'm not just talking about international organisations national organisations are in the same trap. Our idea is to train the local practitioners to use the methodology. The difficulty is that we use an abstract framework as a tool. This is what we're discussing and it raises key issues that, I think, are of great interest.

For example, if you want to use communication as a tool it really depends on the partnership you have established in the community. How do you do that when there is no culture of partnership? If you discuss partnership round a table, everyone says yes but the reality at the village level is that it is very rare to find a culture of collaboration between different organisations and associations. I'm speaking in the area in which I work.

Of course we have to keep budgets in mind when determining how much a project costs but more than this, to remember that money brings its own problems, issues and important to ask questions like what dynamics will money create in a community? It is important to consider what real use money is in a community and to realise that people that will spend it on thing that are not necessary to the project or use it for themselves because the community owes them money.

We're also discussing how you have to associate with the local authorities and traditional leaders and the importance of culture and that type of thing. You cannot just adopt a magical methodological recipe and go with it, you have to adapt it all the time.

CI: As someone who used to work for an INGO, I often saw projects fail or succeed because of the strengths and weaknesses of people working at the local level. What is your overall thinking about who to work with in local communities?

GB: We work with the reality. We don't try to transform the reality. This means we work with the people who are there. This programme is a partner venture between the international funding organisation, L'Agence de la Francophonie, the community, and the responsible government department. They have people already working in the centres and we don't interfere with that because in reality if we are serious about transferring capacities to the local level, so that they can use them in their day to day reality, we cannot pick and choose the best of them. We have to work with the people who are there. Some are very good, and some are not good and some are not good at all. It shows in the intervention and of course, the intervention depends on the people who realise it. They have to work in the community and they have to build allies - questions about those who couldn't do it and those who didn't want to do it, are to me, a different thing. Some also used the activity to build their own political status in the community but these are things over which we didn't have any control.

The only exception we had is that after phase 1 there was a second phase which built on the first. We felt that after 2 or 3 years people begin to understand the new kind of activity. It's very hard, at first, to understand a new way of doing things and apply it. It was very necessary to try to build on the early experience and not let it down after a short term.

In phase 2 we wanted to experiment with introducing ICTs because we were working with different centres from 6 or 7 countries that were all isolated. We thought that using ICTs and developing communication tools that enabled them to reach out would change the situation. The idea was to have people work together, exchange ideas and at the same time experiment with what they could do with ICTs to support their own work. In this phase we intervened by asking each centre to have one person responsible for the communication activity and to make the responsibility stick. This was important because we had never labelled it as such before. It was the centres who would be doing this. We found a lot of difficulty with this because some people didn't transfer information to others and some did, and some began activities and then went away doing something else. It was very important to have some stability, responsibility and accountability first. So we said that we wanted each one to have 2 people, one man and one woman, because in their structure they had very few women working. So we asked as a condition to participate in the programme that one woman be partnered with one man, each of them co-responsible for the communication activity. This is the one exception we acted on in terms of intervening to create something not already in place.

One final word about the second phase and the last 3 years - we're working right now to put lessons together about what we have learned. I think we learned a lot about the power of ICTs as a tool to reach out. A lot of the villages are isolated and used to considering themselves as isolated people but now they have a web site where they can consult. When you click on the participants you can go to wherever on the map of West Africa, and you can go to what each village is doing. So this suddenly changed the situation of isolation completely. They knew that what they were doing was being seen by other centres who were doing things and also by the world community. This really changed the situation. It created emulation and it created a lot of interest and a sense of pride that they could show that they could do something good.

CI: And see what people in other countries were doing?

GB: Exactly. It also facilitated the coordination work because we had one coordinating centre for the entire project. It was based in Africa but they had to cover all those countries at one time. It's very difficult and as you know, it's not easy to travel in rural Africa. So, it was painful. But then, with introducing this, it really helped the coordination and the exchange and put everyone on the same wavelength. It has real advantages.

It also brought forward critical questions that are big problems and that we want to document and discuss in our next publication. Questions like what's the social justification of putting so much money into technologies in rural areas when they lack food or medicine? Who really benefits in the community from the introduction of the technology? Is it the already advantaged class of people in the community or is it also others who are more disadvantaged? What's the proportion between the two? Also, is it really useful, as a communication tool, for in-house activity? We know it's useful for external activity, for information sharing, coordination, etc, but for in-house, the evidence is not so conclusive.

We want to discuss the pros and the cons of this and also to contribute to the debate on ICTs and development. Highlighting not only the benefits it brought and the difficulties we had using it but also the critical questions that need to be put on the table.

CI: From a technical perspective, how were the communication links maintained? Did you use satellite communication?

GB: No, because satellite communication costs a fortune and then you have to add the problem of finding money to sustain the infrastructure. You must always be careful not to create too many artificial conditions because or the project won't be sustainable at all. We used old telephone lines and we had a technical person who discovered a lot of tricks to make it work. We had a lot of problems and had to be very inventive to make it work. Part of the fun was learning how to do that.

CI: That's interesting. I was involved with a rural development centre in Namibia that was in a reasonably developed area that used shared telephone lines. We could not make any internet or email connections work along those phone lines. We could send faxes and make telephone calls, 80% of the time but we could never make the email or the internet work.

GB: In 3 countries that I can think of, the telecommunications department asked our technician who was based in Africa, how it would work because they had never made it work before. The trick was adjusting the speed of the transmission and also choosing certain slots. The guy who did it was really creative and imaginative. He found a lot of technical answers in a context where everyone said it simply wouldn't work.

The main problem is not technical, and even when there is a technical problem it can usually be solved or will be solved in a few years. I think the real problems are related to the connection between using those tools and community preparation and adoption of them. I think the main lesson is not to have it isolated from a community dynamic and to watch for everything the introduction of technology changes or reinforces in terms of power relations, status, and things like that.

CI: It must be very tricky. You're introducing something brand new to a community so there can't be any traditional ways of dealing with access to a new technology or new way of relating with other communities. The introduction of new technologies, by their nature, upsets previous community dynamics.

GB: Exactly. It's an issue with the transfer of any technology. By introducing it, you upset things. This means you have 2 things to do. You have to monitor this but also to try to set up mechanisms to manage the change at the community not the project level. This was done in this project more or less successfully. Before the installation of the internet connection there was a community meeting at the village level inviting a lot of people and explaining what this was about, what are the dangers, what are the benefits, and putting the management of this in their own hands. So they had to use mechanisms they already had to manage what was happening with the introduction of the Internet. I say it has been more or less successful because the mechanisms at the village level are not always very efficient themselves. It has to depend on these and their membership is very important. You always have to put the people you are working with at the community level in the drivers seat.

CI: IDRC is involved in a range of research programmes involving ICTs. Are there other initiatives or projects you'd like to mention?

GB: IDRC has supported 100s of research projects in this area and they have many lessons they are trying to put together as a development resource. This interview cannot cover all of these lessons but let briefly go over one or two of the larger thematics that IDRC focuses on.

In IDRC we work in a structure which is made up of different problematics. One of these is managing natural resources in Africa which is called People, Land and Water. This initiative supports research in natural resource management.

It has 3 objectives and one deals specifically with communication. I'm convinced that communication is so important and so neglected that we must put it at the forefront of the objectives of the programme. I see very few cases where this happens. Communication, when it's there, is usually one set of activities but it doesn't go to the higher level of objective. I think we must put it at the higher level because if you are dealing with community work, communication is the only tool for facilitating participation, that's it. At IDRC we recognise that and put it as one of the objectives so that research teams that want to know if they can participate in an initiative can see if their research deals with all of the objectives.

We plan to support 100s of researchers for 5 or 6 years in a number of projects, and then examine what we have learned from each project and what we can share with others.

There are different kinds of research initiatives. For instance, we are working with an inter-state group focused on the implementation of the universal convention against desertification. One of the projects wants to develop specific participatory communication strategies which would help to support community initiatives. The background is that most of the money has been put in large campaign types of activity for desertification work. A lot of money has gone to popularising the content of the convention. This project seeks to build on this through community initiatives responding to desertification.

Another desertification project is for a campaign either at the local or national level on what to do and what not to do. There are a few experiences where we felt that communication could really help things going on in the field. So the idea of this research is to do a couple of experiments in the form of action research. After a couple of years we will bring together all the decision makers from the participating countries share the lessons learned from those concrete experiences. The idea is to try to influence policy but not from an ideological or ideal point of view but based on real stuff from real people and real problematics.

For example, they have been doing this in Chad and Burkina Faso. They document and video record what they are doing. This year they are setting up a round table for all the decision makers to discuss the lessons from this documentation.

You can see community initiatives everywhere that are supporting things like the participation of women, reforestation, and forest management. This is very important because the pressure on forests is so great in the south that if you don't protect them they will be gone. But policies to protect the forests are not very effective by themselves and without the understanding and support of local communities. People go there to fetch wood or clear land because they have immediate needs. But if communities begin to learn how to get resources and revenue from sustainably exploiting the forests, they will see the value in caring for them.

Another type of research is really unconventional. This one seeks to facilitate the exchange of knowledge between all the stakeholders of a given area. Farmer organisations, rural media, policy makers, extension services, even development projects. There are lots of mechanisms for people to work in synergy to support local participation. This is very interesting because they are actually developing a communication strategy with partners in Burkina Faso and Mali to create communication teams composed of one communicator from a rural media such as radio, one communicator from a traditional media used in the area like theatre, one communicator from an NGO or an extension service working in the area who is not a communicator but is interested in communications for his organisation, and one representative from the farmers called an indigenous communicator who brings basic communication techniques. These teams work to support a variety of community initiatives. We believe we can learn a lot from research like this.

CI: Could this be called an evolution of farm systems extension research?

GB: No, no not at all. It's the other way around. What they want is the community to set the agenda for communication and not the other way around. Usually it has been people from the media who come with their agenda or the extensionists who come with their agenda or the NGOs who come with their agenda and ask the community to participate in this or that. This is the reason why they are dividing their strategy to change that? This approach supports the farming community to set their own agenda, and the media, traditional and modern, reinforce what they want to do.

We are also working with extension services to reverse top-down practises and strengthen the link between researchers at agricultural research stations, the extensionists and the community. By approaching extension this way they are working on farm research with communities. This is in the early stages right now and they are beginning to discuss communication issues with the communities. They are not only discussing productivity problems but also communication and education issues. There are farmers who said they would be ready to play the leading role. So now they are trying to see what they need to play that role with other farmers. Right now they are using traditional media like songs and dances and things like that. The people from the research organisation are trying to learn from this new bottom-up dynamic so that they can change their way of working with communities.

This is very interesting and is being used for things such as conflict resolution around water which is a big issue. It is not rare to have situations where there are 2 wells for 2000 inhabitants. Women start at 5 o'clock in the morning, at 11 some of them still don't have their water. They have tried to develop a methodology to work on the problem with the community and build on existing mechanisms to discuss their conflict such as theatre which women use as a means to work out their differences and to understand what's going on in their fields and how to improve the soil. But theatre is not used to show a solution, it is a way of involving women in a discussion of their own reality, which is quite different.

That gives you some idea of IDRC's communication for development projects and what we're doing with them.

CI: Would you say the kinds of communication initiatives that show the most promise right now are the ones most strongly rooted in direct participation of the communities?

GB: That is part of the answer but not the total answer. I firmly believe that there is a need for communication at every level. The advocacy for communication at the international level that we heard at the Roundtable this morning is also very important. It's just that we have as actors we have to concentrate on specific issues. So direct participation of communities is not the only issue but for me it's very important. If I look at the entire panoramic view there are very few organisations who support this kind of action research. These initiatives are difficult, they often fail, they don't provide a positivists indicator of impact. It's high risk all the line. Very few organisations are willing to take that risk. That's why I think we at IDRC must do it because we can and the research is needed. I think that once you discuss the merits and difficulties of each communication theory and model, at the end of it, what's filtered out, is what's going on at the field level. So to build capacity at the field level, for me, is one of the big challenges. I'm not saying it's the only one but it's one we have to address.

CI: So how do you take lessons from this research and use it to encourage more conservative and risk averse organisations to adopt these approaches and practises?

GB: My way of addressing that question is storytelling. I believe in the story of the process of using communication to support development work. I believe it is a good way of addressing those issues. It's not the technical way, it's very subjective, but it's the real way. If you go into any village where people participate in the research they will talk about their own experience and I feel that when you put those stories together then you can do some analysis, some discussion, you can take some lessons in a systematised way and you can share it with others. But the basis remains those stories that people tell about themselves.

CI: Thank you Guy.