Facilitating dialogue, learning and participation in natural resource management*

FOREWORD This thematic paper presents conceptual and methodological issues related to the use of communication to facilitate participation among stakeholders in natural resource management (NRM) initiatives. It also introduces a collection of papers that focus on participatory development communication (PDC) and NRM, particularly in Asia and Africa. These papers will be published in a single volume following the IDRC–FAO peerreview workshop and this UN Roundtable on Development Communication. There are many approaches and practices in development communication, and most of them have been implemented in the field of environment and NRM. We could have adopted a comprehensive global view of these approaches, but we made a deliberate choice to focus on PDC because of its potential to influence communication practices at the community level in NRM. Even when considering participatory approaches in NRM, communication is often limited to information dissemination activities that mainly use printed materials, radio programmes and educational videos to send messages, explain technologies, or illustrate activities. These approaches, with their strengths and weaknesses, have been well documented. PDC takes another perspective. This form of communication facilitates participation in a development initiative identified and selected by a community, with or without the external assistance of other stakeholders. The terminology has been used in the past by a number of scholars to stress the participatory approach of communication in contrast with its more traditional diffusion approach. Others refer to similar approaches as participatory communication for development, participatory communication or communication for social change. In this paper, PDC is considered to be a planned activity that is based on participatory processes and on media and interpersonal communication. This communication facilitates dialogue among different stakeholders around a common development problem or goal. The objective is to develop and implement a set of activities that contribute to a solution to the problem, or the realization of the goal, and which support and accompany this initiative.