King and McGraw's Knowledge for Development -- Comment 3.

More on King and McGrath’s Knowledge for Development – the World Bank chapter.

Cross-cutting Organizational Structures and Processes

A significant portion of the chapter focuses on the thematic groups of the Bank. These can be seen as operationalising an old theory, implemented in part using new technologies, and better implemented I think than in most development organizations. The World Bank is vertically organized along geographical lines, with country teams and regional divisions. The result is that staff with sectoral expertise – education, health, agriculture, small and medium enterprises – are scattered all over the organizational chart. The idea of the matrix organization would supplement the vertical geographic organization with horizontal linkages among staff members with common professional interests. The Bank has done this well, building on pre-existing self-organized social structures with ICT-based knowledge and communications linkages.

Carrying the idea further, the Bank experimented with global departments, such as the Global ICT Department, that gathered into single departments professional staff working in the same sector from IDRB, IDA, IFC and other Bank Group organizations. While GICT seems to be working, other global departments appear to have been less successful.

The Development Gateway

The chapter spends rather a lot of time on what is rather a small initiative of the Bank’s. Since the book went to print, the independence of the Development Gateway has become much more pronounced. In my opinion, it represents a very interesting style of business developed by the Bank. The World Bank uses its convening power to interest a number of donors in a new idea. The donors combine to fund an organization to implement the idea, and the Bank serves as an incubator for the organization. The organization may then be spun off to sink or swim on its own merits. The Development Gateway has gone through such a process.

I suppose its most successful portions of the DG are:
· AiDA, which is a further development of INDIX (International Network for Development Information Exchange), a preexisting database of projects funded by the major donor organizations;
· dgMarket, which meets a previously unmet need for a single source for the dissemination of procurement information, and its component,
· DACON, a database of consulting companies maintained by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

DG Topics: My own experience with the DG suggests that its topic pages might be viewed from the perspective of a self-organizing network. The DG Foundation plays a central coordinating role, but topic are developed by self-affiliating guides, and lots of people self-select donate content.

I am an editor, unpaid, of three topic pages supported by the DG platform, and have been an advisor for two others. I don’t think that we will solve the world knowledge problem with these pages. On the other hand, the Monitoring and Evaluation of ICT Projects topic page has had some 15,000 resources downloaded in its lifetime. This is almost a solitary hobby of mine, taking about an hour a day. But I think it is quite an opportunity for me to point people to information that they may really find interesting and potentially useful.

What is Knowledge for Development Really About?

Don't believe the writings of people trying to articulate how self-organizing knowledge systems really work. Therefore, don't believe the previous sentence, not this one!

I am concerned with the focus of King and McGrath on better use of knowledge to make donor agencies more cost-effective enterprises. This is of course important, and I favor such efforts within donor agencies.

However, are there not better criteria, such as the ability of agencies to help their client countries and regions to better command and use knowledge? These criteria might included the quality of knowledge available and used in poor countries.

At one extreme, I attach positive value to people understanding such things as the atomic theory of matter, the big-bang theory of the universe, and the hidden-hand theory of market operation, even if they never have occasion to operationalize such knowledge. The quality of such theories – supported by observation, quantified, and linked to other scientific theories – is better than that of competing theories of the nature of matter, the origin of the universe, or the working of markets. I think people in poor countries have a right to high quality knowledge. I see such knowledge as having intrinsic value, value tied to its quality and beauty, and lack of high quality knowledge as a form of poverty to be alleviated.

Fortunately, there are also opportunities to operationalize a great deal of high quality knowledge. Knowledge of the epidemiological conditions in a nation can be used to organize public health. Knowledge of the location and extent of mineral deposits can be used as a basis for the exploitation of those deposits. Knowledge about the operation of institutions can be used to make their operation more useful and efficient to social purposes. I think it important that donor agencies help nations and regions to command and utilize such knowledge.

Technological knowledge is the other extreme, since its quality intrinsically depends on its usefulness. I do not believe that it is good to boil water before drinking, because boiling drives off the evil spirits lurking in the water which if ingested would bring harm to the drinker. But such a belief might well be technologically valuable if, by causing people to boil their water it helped prevent disease. Public health workers 50 years ago encouraged people to boil water to avoid water-born diseases. More recently, it was believed by public health workers that using water to wash utensils and people required more water than poor people were willing to boil, that boiling water involved a lot of hard work for poor people (gathering wood, making charcoal, using inefficient stoves), and that focusing more on water-washed diseases (using unboiled water) was appropriate. The choice among these beliefs should be in part based on utilitarian criteria – which works best to reduce mortality and morbidity?

As an aside, I think the U.N. agencies, such as the World Health Organization or UNAIDS, play a key role in improving knowledge in their client countries, It is too bad that King and McGrath did not include one in their treatment of K4D.

The World Bank, with programs adding to tens of billions of dollars per year, and influence with the entire donor community and national governments of its client countries, could be seen in light of its effects on the command and utilization of knowledge by people in poor nations (for the reduction of poverty in its many forms). I suspect that this impact is not nearly as good as it might be, but King and McGrath have done little to clarify my understanding of the issue. Would that they had, and that they had recommended ways that donor agencies could do better in this respect.