Ethics,communication models,and power in the agricultural community: Thoughts about development communication

Third World farmers are faced with development projects that foster one-way information flows from the government or organization to the farmers, despite the scholarly and practical interest in participatory development models. This article discusses why development projects do not better support power-sharing and proposes introducing sensemaking methodology into the planning and evaluation stages of agricultural development projects.Participation has been difficult to operationalize for many reasons including that communication models used in development are based on the transmission model of communication in which information is envisioned as a thing external to people and communication is the movement of that information from the source to the audience. Sense-making methodology, however, is based on a constructing model of communication in which information is conceptualized not as external to people but a result of their observing and communicating activity. Communication is a constructing process. And the audience is not the target for messages but active participants in creating information.