INFORM – EDUCATE – COMMUNICATE: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON MUSEUM STRATEGIES IN THE MALAGASY CONTEXT

This article analyzes communication strategies actually deployed in the Malagasy context, based on a study conducted across eight museums located in Antananarivo and Antsirabe. Drawing on the IEC triptych (Inform–Educate–Communicate), contributions from cultural mediation (Davallon, Caune), and the field of Information and Communication Sciences (Libaert, Charaudeau, Wolton), the study highlights recurring strengths and limitations affecting public information, pedagogical tooling, and the external visibility of institutions. Based on a corpus combining field data and semi-structured interviews, it proposes an integrated approach to museum communication centered on accessibility (linguistic, economic, situational), pedagogy (curricular alignment, content readability), interactivity (multimodal devices), and participation (co-production with audiences). The article introduces the concept of “educational museum capital”—defined as the set of cognitive, linguistic, and experiential resources that a visit enables visitors to accumulate and reinvest—which serves as a through line for strategically leveraging collections and heritage narratives. It concludes by underscoring the need for coherent, evolving mediation devices that articulate communication, education, and heritage, in order to meet contemporary visitor expectations while strengthening the social anchoring of Malagasy museums.