This report is an account of the The Ninth UN Roundtable on Communication for Development, held in Rome at the FAO from 6–9 September 2004.
The Roundtable is a biannual event bringing together United Nations agencies, bilateral and multilateral donors, foundations, development agencies, non-governmental organizations, scholars, and a number of practitioners in development communication throughout the world.
The last Roundtable, on HIV/AIDS communication and evaluation, marked a decisive recognition that success in achieving sustained behaviour change on a scale required to tackle the pandemic was fundamentally dependent on social change, and that communication strategies needed to focus on both.
The Ninth Roundtable, attended by some 150 participants, focused on sustainable development. Within this broad theme, five main papers were presented:
The report begins with the official Declaration from the Roundtable. It then continues with an introduction which contains summaries of the papers by James Deane, Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao. Following these, there is a summary of the papers presented at the three thematic Working Groups in sections 2–5. Each of these came up with their own recommendations, which are summarized at the end of the relevant section but which can be seen in full in the appendixes.
There was also a plenary discussion on a Plan of Action to be taken as a result of the Roundtable, which can be seen in section 6.
At the same time as the main process was occurring, there were a number of side events, including a UN agencies meeting, and presentations by UN agencies and other organizations on their work in communication for sustainable development. These are briefly presented in the appendices to this report.
