King and McGrath’s Knowledge for Development: Comment 6

Again, still more thoughts occasioned by King and McGrath’s Knowledge for Development.

Having done a riff on the nature of the processes used for the construction of knowledge by development agencies, I must admit I long for high quality standards for knowledge in donor agencies and developing nations. I am looking for validity, and validation by processes which are widely viewed as authoritative. It should be no surprise that not only the scientific community but the public at large doubt the knowledge processes of political and bureaucratic institutions.

One of the more interesting efforts in thiis respect in which I have been involved is the AAAS Science, Technology and Development Fellowship Program. Starting with a single Fellow in USAID, over a period of 15 years the program grew to recruit 15 to 20 Fellows per year, having 30 to 40 in residence at any time. It continues today, eight years later. Thus hundreds of Fellows passed through the program, and perhaps one-third stayed to work in USAID, with many others maintaining activities in international development. This was a post-doctoral fellowship and highly competitive. The Fellows and ex-Fellows brought their professionally trained judgment of the quality of that knowledge on which the Agency was basing policies, strategies, and projects. They also brought new knowledge to bear on these processes. Since the large majority were doing work closely allied with their doctoral training, they undoubtedly raised the quality bar for such knowledge. This is a clear example of an organization learning by hiring new people with “better” knowledge.

One thing that surprised me about the program, however, was the difficulty that Ph.D. holders early in their professional careers had in transferring the knowledge processes learned in their disciplinary training to other kinds of knowledge. People who would never dream of confronting an agronomic problem without command of the relevant agronomic literature, would happily confront a development project design or evaluation without command of the project design or evaluation literature. People who could evaluate the hypotheses, methods, and analyzes in research projects in their own discipline, had to be helped to transferring those skills to research projects in closely allied disciplines. K4D is a tough field!