NOTES ON WCCD, ROME, OCTOBER 2006
1. Discussion of the status and future of communication for development priorities and techniques at the World Conference in brief meant all things to all participants in the set of panel presentations and discussions. This is understandable given the plurality of perspectives and institutions represented by the 700+ event participants. The “participatory” review of the conference document, THE ROME CONSENSUS, was spirited and therapeutic, but to my mind, a strategic dimension was missing.
2. From the central podium, sponsoring international agencies made no substantive commitments nor offered innovative strategic paradigm rewrites. An exception should be noted: the European Union announced a significant increase in its planned Overseas Direct Aid budget. The structural contradiction prevailing among this bevy of development-focused official entities was not addressed: government and international aid agencies are trapped in what has become a traditional, self-referential loop whereby governments are both judge and jury when it comes to approving innovative communication-based development strategies. Civil society initiatives are often more effective and budget efficient in this field, but official “filters” discriminate against their just consideration, adoption and funding. At the WCCD, I sensed an air of these agencies “shopping” for ideas from participants and their respective pet projects.
3. Neither was there any substantive analysis of the types of information now extant in the extensive files and databases of the WCCD sponsoring international agencies. Many of these data sets are now spatially anchored in geographic information systems, or could be reconfigured in such a format without too much cost and effort. FAO, for one, possesses a phenomenal amount of spatial data sets that lend themselves as platforms for different applications. Regional development banks’ loan project documents are seldom recycled. This central question of information sources for the diverse menu of communication modes in distinct development contexts was not addressed, at least in the conference tracks I attended. Nor is it addressed explicitly in the ROME CONSENSUS draft document.
4. PUBLIC GOODS – a concept mentioned by Radhika Lal/UNDP-NY from a panel podium made a profound “shazam click” with my inchoate ruminations about the current lack of access to potentially useful databases inside, for example, international food security and UN technical assistance agencies plus financial institutions (read: World Bank and regional development banks) whose loan project documents could be selectively combined and reconfigured to provide spatially anchored decision support tools for producer, community and migrant groups in most countries, as well as development project administrators. These data sets could distributed in the public domain via web portals designed to complement communication for development initiatives.
5. This endeavor assumes there could be sufficient political will among the heterogeneous family of agencies committed in fact and in spirit with the ROME CONSENSUS to offer their data, collaborate with a multi-institutional coalition whose remit would be the configuration of generic web portals using high resolution spatial data platforms, negotiate the multiple variables useful for the many stakeholders to be served by such a project, and catalyze pilot applications in many regions.
6. A key issue becomes what group or coalition of institutions — public, private and civil society— can/could assume responsibility for generating spatial data platforms from the mosaic of data sources (spatial, quantitative and qualitative) in order to competently serve a multi-stakeholder global constituency.
7. A parallel issue will be the intellectual property rights of the diverse information sources in such a project. I propose a collective Creative Commons license for this strategic enterprise.
8. PUBLIC DOMAIN – the accelerating privatization of information in the global digital space is a direct threat to the sustenance and growth of a strategic public domain of information useful for development processes. This proposal is addressed in part to this issue and could neutralize the current risky privatization of key information sources, a process that will complicate or become a drag on diverse communication for development initiatives.
Missing elements here: remittance role, NGO leadership, resistance.
Photo: Scott S. Robinson
Photographer: Anonymous
