King and McGrath’s Knowledge for Development: Comment 10

I felt, on reading King and McGrath's chapter on JICA, that it might be useful to give some thoughts to the description of knowledge used for development. I suspect that often one can not make generalizations that cover all useful knowledge, but that it is possible to make statements that cover a class of knowledge. So what are some of the dimensions that are used to describe knowledge?

1. Explicit versus implicit;
2. How the knowledge is embodied – in peoples minds, machines, books, supplies (e.g. seeds of improved cultivars embody knowledge gained in the research that lead to the improvement, medicines embody knowledge gained in the development and testing of the product), organizational processes, informal institutions, etc.;
3. The complexity of the bundle of goods, services, and disembodied knowledge needed to effectively utilize a specific item embodying knowledge;
4. How the knowledge is used – for policy, technology, strategy, organizational operation, public awareness, etc.,
5. The processes by which the knowledge was constructed and warranted: legal, political, scientific, traditional, professionally technological (e.g. by engineers or doctors practicing clinical medicine)
6. Locally or generally applicable;
7. By source;
8. By channel of communication;
9. By users;
10. By complexity of local context;
11. By complexity of communication.

Let me just comment on a few of these items.

Complexity of the knowledge bundle: Agriculturalists learned the hard way that you have to consider the whole knowledge package. It does little good to give someone an improved variety to plant, if you can not provide the water, fertilizer, pesticides, and training needed to utilize the variety well. Irrigation was a key to the green revolution, and one can think of the knowledge needed to build and operate an irrigation systems as embodied in the dependable supply of water it provides. Similarly, a lot of knowledge is embodied in the pesticides that keep a crop protected against disease, insects, birds, rodents, and other perils. If these are not available when needed, the crops is damaged, as it is if the farmer doesn’t know when and how to use them.

Locally or generally applicable: King and McGrath seem quite impressed with arguments that all knowledge has to be contextualized to local circumstances. I think the crop-improvement people have made a valuable distinction, suggesting that the International Agricultural Research Centers do the more fundamental R&D, creating varieties with important new properties. These are then adapted to national needs by National Agricultural Research Services. Knowledge is further localized by National Agricultural Extension Services. In the health field, there is similarly basic knowledge that is globally useful, and adaptation of that knowledge for national health services, and ultimately for patients. Even in the social sciences, there is knowledge that is globally useful, even though societies and economies differ one from another, and require localization of sociological, economic, and other forms of social science knowledge.

Complexity of communication: The communications for development professionals have sensitized us to the reality that some knowledge can be communicated by simple messages, and some requires more complicated information transfers. Thus, the use of oral hydration therapy is so simple that it can be communicated to an uneducated mother through a short radio message. The performance of neurosurgery involves such complicated knowledge that it is transferred through years of face-to-face training and education required to train a neurosurgeon.