I have long been under the impression that the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, SIDA, is a leader in building knowledge capacity in developing nations. SAREC, the research and development component of SIDA, also seems to me to be a leader in the field of science and technology. I think King and McGrath would agree.
SIDA, and especially SAREC, is portrayed as continuing to support research and higher education when other donor agencies moved into other programs. I would note that donor agencies seek niches in which they have comparative advantage, can work, and can have cost-effective programs. SIDA may well have found research and higher education such niches just because they were relatively poorly supported by other agencies.
Knowledge and culture
King and McGrath do not note, but in my experience it is true, that donor agencies have different "knoledge cultures" in their different geographic bureaus. In USAID, for example, the approaches used in Africa were different than those used in Latin America, which were different again than those used in Central and Eastern Europe. I suspect that the differences come in part from the differences in client cultures and in economic conditions among those geographic regions, but they may also result from the growth of sub-organizational cultures over decades within the donor agencies themselves. Thus the need for Spanish speaking officers in Latin America versus the need to work in French and English in Africa leads to officers tending to specialize in one or the other region, and to allow differences in organizational cultures among bureaus to accumulate.
I wonder if the fact that SIDA differs from USAID in part because Swedish is a language that few in developing nations understand, while English is very widely spoken?
There are also cultural differences in approaches toward knowledge among the sectors. It has been thought that the knowledge system in agriculture is more developed than that in health, which is in turn more developed than that in environmental programs. The agricultural sector has a very clear knowledge structure built around the International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) which tend to do the more fundamental research, and the National Agricultural Research Centers (NARCs) which tend to adapt improved varieties to local conditions in their countries. The health sector has largely avoided the creation of a network of international biomedical research centers located in developing nations (the IDDRC-B being an exception). When the Tropical Disease Research (TDR) program was created, it explicitly selected an approach making grants to research labs within developing country universities and government research organizations, rather than building new, internationally-financed medical research institutes.
It was fun, when I was involved with peer review of research proposals to see the differences in panels from different sectors. I really think that agricultural scientists tend to talk more slowly than do biomedical researchers. There is kind of a "good old boy" persona among the aggies.
There is a theory that institutional patterns relate to the zeitgeist at the time the institution solidified. The first of the IARCs dates from the 1930’s, while (as I recall) the TDR dates from the 1970s. It may be that the difference in knowledge systems in these sectors reflects in part the dominant cultures in the research and development community at the time they came into being. On the other hand, crop improvement R&D has a logic based on the nature of crops and farming, while biomedical research has a different logic based on the nature of disease and medicine. The institutionalization of sectoral knowledge systems must have some relationship to these realities. Similarly, the advent of biotechnology and the changes in intellectual property rights are driving the shift of crop improvement R&D into the private sector in developed nations, and away from the public sector where such R&D had in the past been seen as producing public goods.
I wonder also whether Swedish culture, which appears to me to be quite rational and valuing knowledge (as compared with other national cultures, especially those of nations with low levels of formal education) affects SIDA’s apparent emphasis on knowledge.
How new is K4D?
King and McGrath focus primarily on SIDA in the last 15 years. They seem to accept statements made in SIDA publications from that period at face value, and as a result seem to me to fail to appreciate how long some of the ideas mentioned have been circulating in the development community.
For example, there were U.N. conferences on science and technology for development in 1979 and in the 1960’s, and the creation of the science program of UNESCO goes further back. The 1979 conference seemed to express much of the thought attributed to SAREC in the last decade and a half. Indeed, SAREC was created in 1975, when the UNCSTD thinking was much in the air, and abolished as a separate agency in 1995 (when it was incorporated into SIDA).
The U.S. major initiative for UNCSTD was the Institute for Scientific and Technological Cooperation (ISTC). In fact, due partly to a change in Administration, the U.S. Congress never funded the ISTC, but did authorize and fund the creation of a Program of Science and Technology Cooperation (PSTC). PSTC operated from 1981 to the late 1990’s, funding research grants primarily to laboratories in developing nations, believing that the best way to build capacity to do research is to do research. It, like key USAID higher-education programs of the period, stressed linkages between developing country organizations and U.S. counterparts, and sought to avoid creating long term dependency. In these way its approach appears to have been similar to that of SIDA.
Institutional development
King and McGrath suggest that SIDA’s emphasis on capacity and institutional development traces to Douglas North’s work dated to 1990 (page 141). I am sure North was influential, but I note in Melvin Blasé’s 1973 book, Institution Building: A Source Book, he traces the coining of the term “institution building” more than 20 years earlier.
Indeed the term in USAID is associated with the codification of experience in building institutions of higher learning in developing nations, especially agricultural colleges. This had been a major focus of U.S. development assistance in the 1960’s. Social scientists in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s tried to develop a framework for the understanding of this experience. Let me quote from Milton Esman, one of the founders of the movement, from a paper titled “Institution Building as a Guide to Action”:
Institution-building may be defined as the planning, structuring, and guidance of new or reconstituted organizations which a) embody changes in values, functions, physical and/or social technologies, b) establish, foster, and protect new normative relationships and action patterns, and c) obtain support and complementarity in the environment. (1966)
The thinking sounds pretty contemporary to me. And indeed, the concern for building institutional capacity in key knowledge organizations in developing nations remains today.
Development Assistance changes with development
In Latin America and Asia, there has been great development of universities and of government research laboratories over the decades. Moreover, private universities and corporate R&D labs have in some cases grown to rival or to supplant public institutions in some developing nations. In the 1950's and 60's, there was indeed a need for bricks and mortar – building the physical infrastructure. Not surprisingly, for those countries that developed, the needs for assistance have changed. Now a lot of the help comes in the form of higher education for their citizens who will (often) return to their countries to work in the knowledge industries, and international higher-education has grown enormously. Development agencies in these cases have changed support mechanisms due to changing needs, not changing ideologies.
On the other hand, many countries have not experienced development, and it has become apparent that efforts using traditional techniques to build knowledge institutions in such countries are often futile. So too, development agencies have sought new alternatives for institutional development in the poorest countries.
Thus, the shift in programs and paradigms is in some cases responsive to a shift in the situation, and in the priority needs that the donors seek to address.
ICT
A major change has occurred in knowledge related donor assistance since 1990 due to the improvements in information and communications technologies, and the massive expansion of the information infrastructure, even in poor nations. The United Nations Computer Center, first conceptualized as a computer serving the poor nations of the world, was transformed into the International Bureau for Informatics, which eventually died. I think these were very early responses to a situation not yet ripe.
Le Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressource Humaine, created in Paris about 1980, contemporaneous with the advent of the IBM PC, was relatively short lived, as the infrastructure and technology still would not yet support its ambitious objectives. The U.S. Agency for International Development spokesperson testified before Congress at the time that the government did not believe that ICT sectoral programs were appropriate, and that all that needed to be done was to introduce PC’s appropriately into client government agencies in the agricultural, health, and other sectoral programs. At the time he may have had some justification for that position.
A few people in donor agencies thought differently, and indeed the National Academy of Sciences published a series of books on microcomputers for development during the 1980's and early 1990's. In the early 1990’s, the advent of the Internet could be seen as a benchmark for the changing attitudes. When I organized a meeting in USAID in 1991 on networking and its development potential, it generated great interest, and about that USAID made its first Internet grant, supporting what eventually became an Internet backbone for Central America.
But the Leland Initiative, infoDev, and other initiatives in the late 1990’s and after indicated that the ICT sector had finally arrived in donor consciousness.
Foundations
I have great respect for the work that the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations have done in building knowledge systems over the decades. It is too bad that King and McGrath did not include the foundations in their report. The foundations have, I think, often pioneered research and development programming in international development. Carnegie has been in the forefront of efforts to support policy research in technology and health. The Freidrich Ebert Siftung (Foundation) in Germany, perhaps in keeping with its roots in a political party, has shown great leadership in building media capacity in developing nations.
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