A joint report with the UK-based Institute of Development Studies is designed to contribute to a more serious and robust research agenda on the media and democracy in fragile states.
In early 2009, the BBC World Service Trust worked with the Institute of Development Studies ( IDS) in the UK to organise a research symposium across disciplines on media and democracy in fragile states.
The idea was to bring a small group of serious academic development thinkers and think tanks from different disciplines together with some renowned media researchers - and practitioners like ourselves.
Our aim was to discuss what a more serious and robust research agenda on media and democracy might look like. The focus was especially on developing countries where democracy and governance is fragile.
Conceived as a way of bringing economists, governance researchers, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists as well as media researchers together to discuss the issue, it included participants from the
London School of Economics,
Overseas Development Institute,
IDS and the
Department for International Development.
A research agenda
Main points of discussion included a potentially substantial and increasingly relevant research agenda on media and communication which could provide important policy insights into state fragility, state effectiveness and state-citizen relationships in developing countries.
It was acknowledged that research on this agenda is starting from a low level, both in terms of content and capacity.
Several priority areas for research were identified, including looking at state transitions and systems of patronage and how media affects these, and other issues of state-citizen relationships.
Interdisciplinary research is also be important, as is research which connects core development research disciplines with media practice and media research.
Next steps
As a beginning, there is an urgent need for more media studies research to be framed within research agendas that resonate with political science and ‘mainstream' development research.
Equally, political analysis and political science, governance, economics and other disciplines could usefully reassess whether these and other research questions should constitute a more serious component of their own research agendas and how media studies could usefully contribute to their understanding.
Practitioner organisations were acknowledged as important sources of current research insight and policy analysis and are an important part of the research mix.
It was also noted that media and communication trends are especially rapid in character, and policy-useful research will need to be similarly rapid to reflect current reality.
More also remained to be done in identifying the most effective grouping of research actors, relationships and methodologies that would deliver timely and research rooted policy guidance on these issues as well as determining more precisely a core set of research questions.
A more predictable and organised resource base to support such efforts was also necessary for real progress to be made.
For a more detailed report on the research symposium discussions, see Head of Policy James Deane's blog at the Communications Initiative here.
The full report is available online (pdf). Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.