King & McGrath's Knowledge for Development: Comment 4

Still more on King and McGrath’s Knowledge for Development:

The Construction of Organizational Knowledge about Development

As I start on King and McGrath's chapter on the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), I am reminded of the variety of kinds of knowledge. DfID has produced a number of White Papers, Target Strategy Papers, and other documents describing what it should do, and how it should do it. These incorporate knowledge of international development. One might suppose that that knowledge is primarily social-science knowledge, derived from controlled observation and data collection, and vetted by replication, peer review, and publication in professional journals. I dispute that perception.

Rather it is bureaucratic knowledge, gained by staff from participation in development projects and programs, and vetted by bureaucratic process. The bureaucratic knowledge is combined with political knowledge, guided by political ideology, gained by consultation with civil society, the private sector, and academia. Diplomatic knowledge is also included in the mix, drawn from intergovernmental consultations, diplomatic theory, observation of political and economic trends and processes in foreign nations, and analyses of the implications of these trends for the UK. These forms of knowledge are combined in a process of social construction of knowledge.

The test of such bureaucratic-political-diplomatic knowledge is not veracity, but its ability to satisfice the various participants in the construction of the knowledge. Not surprisingly, the substantive content of such knowledge can change rather quickly. A new party comes to power, the patterns of influence of the various institutional players shifts, new ideas come into fad while others lose their faddishness, new diplomatic priorities come into play, and new papers are written differing in content from those they replace. Some assume the process is convergent, leading to greater truth in the long run; others might believe the process is merely locked in a chaotic, limit-cycle, shifting in unpredictable fashion from position to position.

Note that there is some difference between the processes for the construction of knowledge about development in multilateral versus bilateral donor agencies. The bilateral agency involves much more explicit political and diplomatic inputs, while the multilateral agency has to satisfice many national clients – both recipients and donors of its resources.

The professional backgrounds of the more influential players in the construction of organizational knowledge also play an important role. Economists are prominent in the construction of development knowledge in the World Bank, perhaps especially so in the case of those reports under the jurisdiction of the Chief Economist. Those economists tend to value highly that knowledge derived from economic theory that is quantified and that is validated by econometrics.

Note that public health experts, educational experts, public administration experts, engineers, and other professionals bring other disciplinary backgrounds to the valuation of information and the construction of knowledge.

I find that, trained myself as an electronics engineer and operations researcher with long experience in the management of applied scientific research, my valuation of information and knowledge construction processes often differs from the valuations of my colleagues. For example, I suspect that I tend to place higher value on the development of engineering knowledge in developing nations than do most of my co-workers. My experience in the health sector, which values highly "knowledge-based" medical practice, and with WHO which valued knowledge-based health policy, contributes to my respect for science-based technique and policy.

The participatory nature of donor agency processes for the construction of development knowledge has value in that the participants feel ownership for the conclusions of their policy and strategy papers, and are perhaps more likely to implement those policies and strategies well. They seem often to enjoy the consultative process.

Are staff members in donor agencies arrogant about their knowledge? King and McGrath seem to suggest so, and that seems also to be a common perception by clients of the donor agencies. Of course, the staff have power to control the resources desired by recipient nations and thus have the ability to dominate in the control of certain knowledge processes. Thus, many nations have country assistance strategies (CAS’a), Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP’s), and poverty eradication action plans (PEAP’s) that are strikingly similar in structure and documentation.

But it may also be that, having written the policy and strategy documents for their agencies, and having their knowledge validated by their peers through their consultative processes, these folk really feel that their knowledge is in fact of a superior nature and quality. Staff of different donor agencies may each feel their knowledge is superior to that of their counterparts.

Topography of Knowledge Systems

King and McGrath seem to imply that the World Bank and DfID staff see their organizations as important repositories of development knowledge, which their organizations must share with developing nations. I guess I share that belief, but I also realize that the more than six billion people outside of the Bank and DfID staffs have more knowledge than do those those agencies with their few thousand staff members. The idea of a few thousand staff members collecting development knowledge from around the world, processing it, and then disseminating it is OK -- as long as it is realized than only a very small fraction of the world’s knowledge is involved in these processes.

In the case of DfID, I suspect that there is much more knowledge in the UK and in the client countries than there is in DfID itself. In the case of the World Bank, the situation is even more extreme. There is vastly more knowledge in the extended community that the Bank can tap and in the recipient nations than there is in the Bank. Indeed, the donor agency might be seen as a narrow point in a channel connecting the large population of people and organizations willing to supply knowledge with the very large population of people who need and want that knowledge. The most important job of the donor agencies may lie:
-- in building the capacity in poor nations to participate in and to tap into global knowledge systems, and
-- in the development of new, higher-bandwidth channels for knowledge transfers. Perhaps surprisingly, in my experience, bilateral donors have long emphasized the complementary need to improve the ability of their domestic consulting firms and universities to provide knowledge for development.