Abstract
Media Policy Studies is under-theorized, even as it has grown as a distinct sub-field in the larger canvas of communication and media studies in the West. In South Asia, barring empirical studies that seek to delve into media policies, much headway has not been made into theorizing the field. In such a scenario, theoretical impetus to this growing sub-field is but warranted. This chapter seeks to present a theoretical framework to the study of media policy, called the Deliberative Policy Ecology (DPE) Approach, in an effort to address this gap. The approach draws on ideas of deliberation as praxes of communication in politics and policymaking in bringing about “voice parity”, and on the idea of ecology as a heuristic device. The DPE Approach is placed in dialogue with the cosmopolitan approach to media governance that the editors of this volume present, in order to understand commonalities and divergences. Importantly, the DPE Approach contributes to a possible Sustainable Media Governance, especially as a Southern and decolonial approach to its study and praxes.
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Notes
- 1.
The Centre for Culture, Media and Governance (CCMG) was set up in Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), New Delhi, and is the only Centre that offers a course in Media Governance in India and the larger region.
- 2.
The very idea that a majority of the world could be hinged on the phrase, the “non-West” spoke of the primacy of the West in terms of linguistic connotation. I use it here to pinpoint and highlight the interventionist attitudes of the West, and not necessarily to buy into the defining of the rest of the world as the non-West.
- 3.
It is my contention that the subalterns have been speaking through acts of courage and subversive measures but are “unheard and hated”. This is a theoretical and conceptual framing that grants them their agency even in their silences by mobilizing this statement (Raghunath, 2022).
- 4.
One such effort in bringing together work on media policies in South Asia was a side-event organized at the annual conference of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), in 2021, by the Global Media Policy Working Group. An updated version of papers presented will be published as a special issue of the Journal of Digital Media and Policy (Intellect), in March 2022.
- 5.
These stakeholders are recognized by officiating actors like the state or funding agencies that facilitate media policy processes. Such actors are usually the more established and institutionalized representatives of civil society and other formalized actors.
- 6.
By “fluid identities”, I refer to those policy actors who are unrecognized or gain recognition over time, start off or masquerade as certain kinds of policy actors and evolve over time to assume divergent identities in the media policy space.
- 7.
In my previous work which developed the DPE Approach (Raghunath 2020), I speak of the policy ethnography at “deliberative sites”, where conversations and deliberations on various aspects of media policies take place. These could range from formal venues to informal spaces on the sidelines of more formal events.
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Raghunath, P. (2022). Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach: Media Policy Studies from South Asia. In: Ganter, S.A., Badr, H. (eds) Media Governance. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05020-6_13
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