Knowledge for Development: Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid

I have been reading King and McGrath’s book, Knowledge for Development: Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid. I will probably post several comments occasioned by the book in coming days.

It is too bad that the authors didn’t cover the U.S. Agency for International Development. The failure to do so is especially notable in the first chapters, which cover the history of thinking about K4D. Since USAID was so important a source of donor assistance in the early years, its approach to K4D was especially formative.

I note that much of my experience was not mentioned. Thus I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, at a time when there were 140 PCVs in Chile with advanced degrees. A decade of a program of this magnitude seems likely to have had a K4D impact. I later served in the Research in Epidemiology and Communications Science Department of the World Health Organization – one of the first in the development community to advocate knowledge based (health) policy. I continued to try to develop knowledge based health policy from the Office of International Health, USAID, and the White House in the mid 1970’s. Then for some 20 years I was responsible for links between USAID and the U.S. National Academies. In this latter capacity, I was involved in bringing scientific knowledge to bear on USAID policy, developing research programs in the South, and publishing many monographs intended to identify underexploited technologies with economic potential for development. It seems to me my career focused on K4D long before the term became popular.

Learning Organizations

King and McGrath made me think again of a pet peeve – that people don’t understand how organizations learn.

Of course, organizations learn when their members learn.

There is a lot of thought now about organizations learning by their members documenting experience (usually in electronic form), these records being archived in knowledge bases, and the relevant records being accessed by others when the knowledge they contain is needed or desired. Well enough!

What is organizational learning? It is an increase in the capacity of an organization to respond well to opportunities to accomplish organizational objectives, or to avoid threats to the organization.

Under this definition, organizations also learn by hiring knowledgeable people. They learn by replacing less knowledgeable people by more knowledgeable people.

Any boy scout troupe learns that the kids who can cook should be set to doing so, and the ones who can’t should be set to gathering wood. They learn the lesson by bitter (literally) experience. Note that the people don’t change in the organization, and the kids who can’t cook don’t learn to do so. The organization learns simply by reallocating responsibilities, bringing knowledge that exists in the group to bear where it will bring the most benefit.

Organizations also learn by buying knowledge-embodying equipment and supplies, but improving organizational structure and process, by improving the physical facilities and the organization of activities within those facilities, by outsourcing functions that can better be performed by others, etc.