Engaging culture in development - Exchange lunchtime discussion report

Culture needs to be more explicit in development policy and practice, concludes new research by Creative Exchange.

Culture is implicit in many of the 350 projects Creative Exchange surveyed as part of their Routemapping Culture and Development research in 2003, even though the research found that project evaluations and policy rarely refer explicitly to culture. But in order to engage people’s energy through cultural approaches, development practitioners need to understand culture as a way of working respectfully with people’s particular understandings of the world around them rather than as an instrument to deliver change.

Helen Gould and Mary Marsh from Creative Exchange introduced the research. Discussion focused on four areas:

Culture is a confusing term. The Routemapping Culture and Development research has found that culture operates at three different levels in development: as a context in which development takes place, as a rich source of locally appropriate content for communication programmes, and as a method of building dialogue, enabling expression and promoting participation by beneficiaries.

Culture as context refers to a deep level of knowledge, and one of the ways this can be accessed is through overtly cultural activities like theatre, visual art, radio, photography or dance. But using cultural methods in development is not a short cut to participation and certainly won’t guarantee the successful delivery of an external message.

If the culture of a group of people is invisible, how can they develop the self-esteem needed to fight poverty, resist negative characterisations of their way of life or change harmful practices? “We need new ways of evaluating culture,” said Helen, “because social science evaluation tools don’t work in a cultural realm.”

Helen referred to the UN articles that protect cultural rights but also pointed out that it can be politically inconvenient to acknowledge the culture of people who have been oppressed or marginalised. However if culture remains invisible then the plight of people most affected by poverty will also remain invisible. And the positive aspects of culture that can lead people out of poverty will remain invisible too.

Communication is inherent in culture. But the idea of evaluating communication – seeing who is speaking, listening, influencing, who's agenda is being followed – seemed crazy to many development practitioners not so long back. However communication processes are now at the centre of several initiatives that emphasise participation and try to work with local cultures – the UNAIDS HIV/AIDS communication framework, TearFund's PILLARS project, The Communication for Social Change Consortium, for example.

One important distinction is between genuine participation and a top-down version of participation, noted several people during the discussion. “I have problems with outside demands for participation, rather than creating an enabling environment where people can choose to participate or not” said Mary.

Everyone has a culture. And development practitioners are no exception. Power needs to be acknowledged, said Mary. If development practitioners are clear about their own assumptions they will be better able to hear other people and be accountable to them.

If development programmes are challenging someone’s culture in order to change harmful behaviour, then this needs to be explicit. Andrew Chetley of Exchange gave the example of UNDP’s community dialogues. These have enabled communities to question and stop female genital mutilation practices in Cambodia, Malawi and Kenya because they acknowledge that people’s relationships, power and emotions influence any change in their behaviour. Rob Vincent of Exchange gave the example of the Salvation Army working with traditional healers in Malawi to develop a safer cleansing practice for women when their husbands die. Instead of having sex with a relative of their dead husband, the sap from a tree symbolises semen in an alternative cleansing ritual.

Engaging culture in development doesn’t necessarily mean using a cultural methodology. It does however mean engaging with the cultural factors that affect whether or not people can improve their situation and valuing creative cultural responses. Helen stressed that here is no need to invent new language to understand culture, but an urgent need to reflect on what is already known through the development literature and the experience of practitioners.