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

King, Kenneth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842773259 ISBN 13: 9781842773253

Verlag: Zed Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

In 1996, the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, declared that his organization would henceforth be 'the knowledge bank'. This marked the beginning of a new discourse of knowledge-based aid, which has spread rapidly across the development field. This book is the first detailed attempt to analyse this new discourse. Through an examination of four agencies -- the World Bank, the British Department for International Development, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency -- the book explores what this new approach to aid means in both theory and practice. It concludes that too much emphasis has been on developing capacity within agencies rather than addressing the expressed needs of Southern 'partners'. It also questions whether knowledge-based aid leads to greater agency certainty about what constitutes good development. 


'New information technology has the capacity to revolutionize the delivery of development assistance, but only if accompanied by institutional changes, including a move away from centralization and top-down aid processes. In this excellent book the authors present a detailed analysis and balanced assessment of the prospects for knowledge-based aid to achieve the goal of improving aid effectiveness. Based on conceptual framework setting and a close examination of actual experience they conclude that success depends on reconceptualizing aid itself in the direction of capacity building in poor countries.'

Ravi Kanbur, T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, Cornell University


'Knowledge management is popular. Aid agencies talk easily of sharing stories, communities of practice and double-loop learning. But are they ready to sacrifice a preoccupation with results and a concern to disseminate 'best practice' in favour of real partnership and mutual learning across divergent networks? King and McGrath are sceptical. Their case studies and argument challenge all of us involved in the production, sharing, and use of knowledge.'

Simon Maxwell, Director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kenneth King is Professor of International and Comparative Education and Director of the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of several books , including 'Aid and Education' and 'Changing International Aid to Education' (edited with Lene Buchert).
Simon McGrath has been a research fellow at the Centre of African Studies, and became Research Director at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, South Africa in October 2002.
Both authors have published extensively in African Studies and International Comparative Education and have been researching development cooperation for a number of years.
Kenneth King is Professor of International and Comparative Education and Director of the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of several books , including 'Aid and Education' and 'Changing International Aid to Education' (edited with Lene Buchert).
Simon McGrath has been a research fellow at the Centre of African Studies, and became Research Director at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, South Africa in October 2002.
Both authors have published extensively in African Studies and International Comparative Education and have been researching development cooperation for a number of years.

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Knowledge for Development?

Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid

By Kenneth King, Simon McGrath

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2004 Kenneth King and Simon McGrath
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84277-325-3

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
List of abbreviations and acronyms, ix, 
1 Researching knowledge-based aid, 1, 
2 The new aid agenda, 18, 
3 Knowledge for development, 32, 
4 The World Bank or the knowledge bank?, 55, 
5 From information management to knowledge sharing: DFID's unfinished revolution, 99, 
6 Knowledge, learning and capacity in the Swedish approach to development cooperation, 130, 
7 Experience, experts and knowledge in Japanese aid policy and practice, 155, 
8 Conclusions and implications for knowledge, aid and development, 196, 
Bibliography, 213, 
Index, 230, 

CHAPTER 1

Researching knowledge-based aid

Setting the scene

Since 1996 there has been a remarkable growth within development co-operation agencies of interest in knowledge-based aid. Most agencies have launched projects that seek to make their work better grounded in the knowledge that they already possess within their organisations and to explore more effective ways of acquiring external knowledge related to development. At the same time, there has also been a growth in emphasis on more effectively disseminating this knowledge – to other agencies, to their own civil societies, to their partners in the South, and to the billions of poor people who are the stated beneficiaries of the whole intertwined aid and development project. Equally, there has been a revisiting of old notions that the poor are poor in large part because of their lack of appropriate knowledge. To the old account, expressed in many colonial and missionary texts, are added the new dimensions of globalisation (as the force shaping the knowledge needed) and information and communications technologies (ICTs – as an important new set of tools in the dissemination of this knowledge).

This book is the first that seeks to examine this phenomenon as a result of academic research in a series of agencies. It does so through a detailed analysis of what the new knowledge-based aid means at the level of discourse and practice in four leading development co-operation agencies.

In so doing, we are mindful that this knowledge-based aid contains a language that suggests that the lessons of past aid and development mistakes have been learned and that a new ethics of aid is an important aspect of the language of the new approach. However, we are also aware of both the continuing critiques of aid practices that suggest that there is much more business-as-usual than transformation, and the continued questioning of the theoretical underpinnings and practical impacts of aid and development.

In writing this book, we inevitably had to engage with the literatures on aid and development, and have sought to add to these. Accounts of agency policy and practice tend to polarise between 'official versions' (e.g. Kapur et al. 1997) and polemical attacks (e.g. Hancock 1989), and have been heavily focused on the multilateral agencies. Some, however, have more successfully attempted critical engagement, through an analysis that uses national case studies of the relationship between stated policy and its operationalisation (e.g. Mosley, Harrigan and Toye 1991), through a sensitive and reflective negotiation of access to a single agency in a single sector (e.g. Jones 1992), or through an analysis of the nature of development discourses and their playing out in a national context (e.g. Ferguson 1994). Whilst Crewe and Harrison (1998) talk of an ethnography of aid, even their work does little to get inside bilateral or multilateral agencies. Valuable though their approach is, their case studies are essentially of a large NGO (with real insider insights, as one of them worked for this NGO) and of a project of a multilateral agency. This present book is an unusual attempt (cf. King 1991) to look in depth across a group of bilateral and multilateral agencies in a way that allows for critical dialogue with the agencies. It is also an attempt to produce a sociological reading that moves between the realms of text and practice.

Agency accounts of aid are typically ahistorical. In their rush to develop new ideas and to gloss over past failures, agencies have tended to construct a collective amnesia about the past. It is inevitable, therefore, that current aid discourse recreates many elements of this past without recognising them. One of our concerns in this book will be to provide some historical depth. It is particularly important that we explore where knowledge-based aid has come from. We shall preview two strands of this context here before returning to them in some depth in the next two chapters.

Knowledge-based aid is only a small part of the broader changes that have taken place in development co-operation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The World Conferences of the 1990s, the growing importance of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its promulgation of six International Development Targets, and a new architecture of donor co-ordination mechanisms have furthered a broader ideological convergence of agencies.

The new aid agenda brings with it new knowledge needs. However, it also brings a new importance for knowledge as a major theme of development and co-operation. The new focus draws heavily on wider arguments about the centrality of knowledge to economic success and about the connective power of new ICTs. Through the interweaving of these accounts in a literature and practice of knowledge management, agencies have begun to look at internal patterns of knowledge use as a key response to the critique of their effectiveness. At the external level, the term 'knowledge sharing' has become attractive as a way of distancing agencies from the widespread critique of conditionalities, while at the same time seeking to ensure that agency positions have influence over Southern countries' policies. Concurrently, arguments about the importance of knowledge economies have been directly translated into the development context to argue that knowledge is the key determinant of development (World Bank 2002a).

Research questions

However, this agency fascination with knowledge is in need of careful questioning. What does the emergence of knowledge-based aid amount to in practice? What explains its emergence? Why do agency approaches differ and how significant is this? Whose knowledge and whose visions of development are prioritised and whose marginalised? Does knowledge-based aid make for more efficient and effective agencies? Does knowledge-based aid make for more efficient and effective aid? This book seeks to address these questions.

As knowledge-based aid develops further it will also be important to research its impacts on the supposed beneficiaries in the South who are to be helped out of poverty through its operations. However, this is beyond the scope of our study.

A new way of researching; a new way of working

Almost at the very moment that the 1998–99 World Development Report on Knowledge for Development (World Bank 1998a) (see chapters 3 and 4 of this book) was published, the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) announced a new research programme, 'Future Governance', that would seek to develop new knowledge about policy processes...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zed Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1842773259
• ISBN 13: 9781842773253
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland