Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

For a long time sustainable development projects have claimed a multidisciplinary work approach, a situation in which communication has been the last element to be formally integrated to the field. In this sense, this thesis has the aim to explore and analyze the communication experiences when implementing sustainable development projects in Latin America and more important to examine to what extent communication is a well-understood element for practitioners. Through open-question interviews, a variety of eight institutions which included a selection of NGOs, private and scientific sectors, revealed how they perceived communication within the implementation of their projects. It was found that they shared a common picture of what sustainable development is and how should projects be implemented from the communication perspective, but it was their conceptual understanding that made them catalogue their communication efforts in other areas. All the interviewees based their communication perspective in the traditional concept: they classify it as a strategy that is related to the spread of information and acts of diffusion. Nevertheless, they had other sorts of communication principles embedded in their project implementation processes, a statement that raises important discussion questions throughout the thesis.