Local media workshop and its role in development

In the context of the local administration and development project, the Nation Building Movement held a workshop at its headquarters in Damascus entitled “Local Media and its Role in Development” on March 22, 2019, with the participation of media professionals from various media outlets and from various Syrian governorates.​

Human rights activist Bashar Mubarak, coordinator of the “Local Administration and Development Project” in the Nation Building Movement and one of the trainers in the workshop, pointed out that local administration goes beyond the limits of the institutional administrative aspect of the work of local councils and the laws regulating them. This aspect is integrated with the societal dimension through the participation of local communities, primarily the media.​

Mubarak explained that the media must be present by monitoring and following up on the local community as a block with its own dynamism and interaction with the environment to which it belongs, and the local administrative councils emanating from it, based on the important oversight role assigned to it by the Local Administration Law as one of the tools of popular oversight of the work of these councils.

Mubarak stressed that the role of the media contributes to bridging the gap of trust between the councils and the tasks they perform and the local communities that have accumulated a lot of experience in previous years through their development and relief roles and are now more in need of access to correct information and participation in the process of formulating local plans and discussing them later.

Mubarak stressed the need to employ all societal and governmental capabilities to serve the implementation of these plans, especially in light of the developments in the Syrian scene that impose themselves on various social, economic and political levels, and directly affect the context of government work and the plans and programs that the government is currently working on, in an attempt to draw the horizons of the next stage for post-war Syria, in approaches that still operate according to a central planning methodology that is also reflected in the mechanism of work and implementation.

Regarding the reality of the media in Syria during the post-war period and its needs to advance the development process, Bilal Sulaytin, a journalist and trainer in the workshop, explained that during this workshop, broader knowledge was provided about the role of the media, its needs, and its role in keeping pace with the transformation that Syria is witnessing towards administrative decentralization, and the extent to which the local media contributes positively to this transformation and supports this concept, pointing out that the media can transform from being passive and keeping pace with the event to a partner in the process of development and advancement in society.

Since we are talking about local administration and participation, it was important and necessary to resort to the media itself and its actors, especially in the localities, in order to work on identifying the media’s needs from them primarily, and to participate with them in determining the role of the media during the process of transition towards administrative decentralization.

A number of outputs resulted from this workshop on the need for diverse local media institutions, increasing the geographical spread of media professionals so that no region is marginalized, in addition to capacity building, spreading awareness and knowledge to the public, and others.

The workshop reviewed the results of a locally conducted study on the Syrian public and its needs, and the local media in Syria, as part of the context of the concept of local administration and local journalism.