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citizens to engage in violence requires intervention on multiple fronts. The section that follows describes
the ecological model, which is the theoretical framework that I feel best explains the current approach
of the PDEV media team. In this section, I describe the model and situate it among other approaches to
social and behavior change communication. The overview of the Ecological Model will allow me to apply
relevant terminology in the description and discussion of PDEV media programming and its impact.
The Ecological Model: A multi-layered approach to behavior and social change
Efforts to affect human behavior through communication go back as far as Aristotle, who wrote
extensively on the use of speech and other ―available means of persuasion‖ to influence others.
Beginning in the 1960s, academics and practitioners began making reference to ―development‖
communication. In Communication for Development in the Third World Srinivas Melkote and H.L. Steeves
trace the use of communication to improve the living conditions of society, beginning with post-World
War II efforts based on theories of modernization, which privileged economic development fostered by
persuasive, top-down models of communication promoted via mass media and information disseminating
―extension agents.‖ 19 This continued ―pro-persuasion‖ model described by Melkote and Steeves was
used extensively by government agencies intervening in the fields of rural agriculture and health and
operating under the assumption that the innovation or technique being promoted was beneficial and
useful. 20 Innovative and ―modern‖ technologies were presumed to ―develop‖ traditional societies.
In Mass Media and National Development, for example, Wilbur Schramm describes the role of
mass media as ―bringing what is distant near and making what is strange understandable [in order to]
bridge the transition between traditional and modern society.‖ The mass media, he writes, ―can
contribute substantially to the amount and kinds of information available to the people of a developing
country.‖ For Schramm, the assumption is that increased information can lead to national development.
A report prepared in 1980 for the United Nations by 1974 Nobel laureate Sean MacBride and a
team of international colleagues challenged the development communication model. The MacBride
Report, as the document came to be known, calls for a ―New World Information Order‖ that would
involve ―more justice, more equity, more reciprocity in information exchange, less dependence in
communication flows [and] less downwards diffusion of messages, more self reliance and cultural
identity, more benefits for all mankind.‖ 21 The report was highly critical of the one way flow of
information between the ―fully informed‖ who decide what information to make available and the
―under-informed‖ who are powerless to address the imbalance. 22 Academics and communication
practitioners began discussing alternatives to the one-way flow of information focused on individual level
―behavior change,‖ proposing new models that situate the individual within a broader ecology of
influences and contexts, including families, neighborhoods, institutions, cultures‘ historical legacies and
political systems.
This shift to the ecological approach required the acknowledgement that individual-level change,
although desirable, is often insufficient. Should we use persuasion to promote condom use if individuals
have no access to them, cannot afford them or find them culturally unacceptable? Should we ―target‖
individuals with messages of accountability and transparency while leaving corrupt systems and
19 Melkote, S.and Steeves, H. Leslie (2001). Communication for Development in the Third World: Theory
and Practice for Empowerment Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, p. 55.
20 Melkote and Steeves, Communication for Development, p. 56.
21 The MacBride Commission (1980). Many Voices One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient
World information and Communication Order Paris: Unesco,,pp. xviii.
22 MacBride Commission, Many Voices, One World, pp. 36-37.
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