Approaching social change as a complex problem in a world that treats it as a complicated one: the case of puntos de encuentro, Nicaragua
Keywords:
Communication for social change, complexity science, complex systems, decentralized control and self-organizing processesAbstract
Puntos de Encuentro, a Nicaraguan feminist non-profit organization, is implementing an innovative approach to designing communication strategies to foster social change. This case study uses Complexity Science’s principles as a framework to analyze Puntos de Encuentro’s communication strategy and to explore some of the emerging critics to the traditional communication for social change theories and evaluation methods. The findings suggest that Puntos has intuitively applied basic principles of Complex Systems in its work and it is mindful of several of the Complexity Science tenets: history and context dependency, non-linearity and paradoxes, the supremacy of the whole over the sum of its parts, the relevance of the quality of the relationships and interactions, the benefit of decentralized control for order emergence and self-organization, and the importance of a free, diverse and participatory flow of meaningful information for the system to change and evolve. The authors conclude that a communication for social change approach framed in Complexity-based concepts can be an alternative to our array approaches to promote change.
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