This book is the first of its kind within the African region to combine scholarly perspectives from the fields of Strategic Communication Management and Communication for Development and Social Change. It draws insights from scholars across the African continent by unravelling the complementary nature of scholarship between the two fields, through the lens of prevailing governance and sustainability challenges facing African countries, today. This edited volume covers issues that have adversely affected the achievement of goals related to humanitarian upliftment, development and social change for all African nations. Consequently, citizen participation, which lies at the heart of these challenges when considering the question of sustainable governance and policy development for social change in an African context is addressed. To this end, a reflection is also made on various case studies that exist where local citizens do not inform sustainable development programmes, while the promotion of bottom-up development and social change is largely replaced by top-down instrumental action approaches and hemispheric communication instead of strategic communication. Themes explored include: ● Communication for social change, bottom-up development and social movements in the local government sphere ● Strategic communication in governance, planning and policy reforms ● The role of multi-stakeholder partnerships in achieving development of objectives geared towards good governance in Africa ● Public participation, protests, and resistance from 'below' ● Public sector health communications and development ● Media relations, accountability and contested development narratives with the Fourth Estate ● Social media and eParticipation in government development programs.

"This book provides critical research and knowledge on electronic cultivation and political development experiences from around the world"--Provided by publisher.

With the rise of the knowledge for development paradigm, expert advice has become a prime instrument of foreign aid. At the same time, it has been object of repeated criticism: the chronic failure of technical assistance a notion under which advice is commonly subsumed has been documented in a host of studies. Nonetheless, international organisations continue to send advisors, promising to increase the effectiveness of expert support if their technocratic recommendations are taken up. This book reveals fundamental problems of expert advice in the context of aid that concern issues of power and legitimacy rather than merely flaws of implementation. Based on empirical evidence from South Africa and Tanzania, the authors show that aid-related advisory processes are inevitably obstructed by colliding interests, political pressures and hierarchical relations that impede knowledge transfer and mutual learning. As a result, recipient governments find themselves caught in a perpetual cycle of dependency, continuously advised by experts who convey the shifting paradigms and agendas of their respective donor governments. For young democracies, the persistent presence of external actors is hazardous: ultimately, it poses a threat to the legitimacy of their governments if their policy-making becomes more responsive to foreign demands than to the preferences and needs of their citizens.