Dialogue The Public Sphere, Globalization and Technological Development TINA SIKKA ABSTRACT Tina Sikka examines the emergence and transformation of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, looking at how this concept informs the debates around communication technologies in development. KEYWORDS public sphere; globalization discourse; development; technology Introduction In this article, I look at Habermas’s classical definition of the public sphere with an examination of some of its contemporary applications by Agnes Ku, Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge, and Nancy Fraser. Through this discussion I look at how developing a ‘democratic,’ public sphere-oriented communications policy in the ‘Third World’ (through globalizing technologies and neo-liberal economic policies) requires developing countries to assert control over the development of technology from the ground up rather than only focusing on the ability to control economic and cultural policy. Habermas’s theory of the bourgeois public sphere Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere evolved as a political attempt to reinvigorate the Enlightenment project of freedom, ‘through the reconstruction of a public sphere in which reason might prevail, not the instrumental reason of modern practice but the critical reason that represents the best of the democratic tradi- tion’ (Ku, 2000: 220). Habermas lays out the historical background and basic principles of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society . His central argument is that, historically, the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe can be distinguished by the rise of a public sphere, which stood between civil society and the state. Through the public sphere individuals were able, for the first time in history, to mediate between public (state) and private (civil society and the market ^ all non-state actors) interests and shape public opinion and political practice. Habermas’s specific definition of the public sphere is a domain of uncoerced conversation oriented towards pragmatic agree- Development, 2006, 49(3), (87–93) r 2006 Society for International Development 1011-6370/06 www.sidint.org/development Development (2006) 49(3), 87–93. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100277