Asian Contributions to Communication for Development and Social Change

This chapter is a celebration of the Asian contributions to development communication, which was a term employed by the pioneers of the field. Over the years, other terms have come into use, including communication for development and social change. While the emphasis has been placed in the fact that these were pioneering contributions, this chapter examines the specific attributes of such a contribution and how, considered in retrospective, students of society will come to appreciate the fundamental aspects of theory and practice today that trace their origins to these experiments. The chapter highlights seven of these contributions in order to demonstrate the fundamental concerns that drive the agenda, processes, and partnerships in the field. The chapter acknowledges that the field has moved on; there is a growing danger of a growing disregard for history, as if the field just emerged without a historical context. Yet it is this very historicity, in Asia, as much as in Latin America and Africa, that continues to shape the practice on the ground, even in the face of the historical revisionism of modernist development approaches mostly being promoted by international development institutions.