Abstract
Maja van der Velden looks at how knowledge and power are played out in development literature and practice examining the role of knowledge, public goods and the new information communications technology (ICT) in managing and sharing knowledge. She discusses the World Bank's knowledge-for-development paradigm arguing that the paradigm of knowledge management on which it is based will lead to a grave loss of knowledge. She concludes that civil society can further its social justice and developments objectives by protecting knowers and their physical and cultural environments and by facilitating the dialogues of different knowledge.
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Notes
See www.globalknowledge.org and www.developmentgateway.org. International organizations and research institutes around the world are inspired by or have modelled their KM activities after the ‘Knowledge Bank’ (see also King, and McGrath, 2003). For example, UNDP has established a distributed system for explicit and tacit knowledge sharing – the Sub-regional Resource Facilities (SURFs) that is similar to the World Bank's internal Communities of Practice or thematic groups. Overall, KM's introduction to the development sector has been top-down, from the corporate sector in the ‘north’, via the World Bank and international development agencies, to development organizations in the ‘south’. Bellanet is one of those organizations that play an important role in promoting KM and facilitating the exchange of KM for development experiences via its international workshops and mailing lists (see www.bellanet.org/km/). It is also interesting to look at the KM pedigree in individual organizations. For example, Tearfund, a British development NGO, mentions the US Army and BP/Amoco as its models.
Particularly in (neo-)evolutionary economic theory. See for example Stehr (2002) for a discussion of the economic role of knowledge.
This example also makes clear that the decision of what is a public good and what is a private good is a political one. In Ghana water used to be a common public good, but is now privatized under pressure from the IMF and World Bank.
4 Abildgaard (1997) describes the failure of a clean water system in a village in Ghana, even though the system was built with high-level community participation. She found that the villagers' understanding of guinea worms was different from that of the ‘western/scientific’ explanation. Thus, providing scientific causal knowledge did not change the practices of the villagers.
‘Best practice’, a popular KM tool, strengthens the institutionalization of development knowledge. Best practice refers to an organization's most effective approach to a problem. Through ICT, best practices are widely shared within the development community.
Jensen (2000) calls in this context also for a cultural relativism, based on culture-as-knowledge. In development, culture is generally understood as an obstacle to development, not as knowledge. If people with new knowledge are not behaving as expected, it is their culture that obstructs change. Culture is not perceived as a position from which one sees, knows, act, but as culture-as-tradition.
‘Communities of resistance’ is the title of a publication by Sivanandan, (1990), and discusses the black struggles and inner-city uprisings in the UK.
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van der Velden, M. From Communities of Practice to Communities of Resistance: Civil society and cognitive justice. Development 47, 73–80 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100004
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100004