Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Rethinking Communication for Development and Social Change in Health Communication

Communication for development and social change is an evolving field both in research and practice, transcending paradigms of conventional communication towards engaging and somewhat exposing some of the real-life communicative disorders experienced by communities. While public health and communication for development and social change operate from diverse paradigmatic thinking and are applied quite independently as disciplinary fields of study, health communication converges these fields in research and practice. In this paper, I discuss these interdisciplinary perspectives that draw from communication for development and social change principles and public health through a process of divergence and convergence towards new ways of thinking about decision making. Much of this discourse stems from understanding many health problems as a development problem first, one that recognises the role of community responses during pandemics yet at the same time places the agency back with individuals to make informed choices. Communicating for health decision making from this perspective is what I call Communicating for Health-as-Development (C4HD). C4HD foregrounds health as development, which caters to the messy, unidirectional, non-process-orientated, non-measurable and often non-data-driven approaches to health outcomes. It is in these messy health communication efforts that real development takes place. This paper, using examples from HIV and COVID-19, discusses these ongoing developments in the field and the convergence of public health and communication for development and social change from an interdisciplinary perspective, by exploring three key concepts: community engagement to influence decision making, community agency and ownership, and context and collaboration, which contribute to understanding communication for health-as-development.