Knowledge-based Aid: a new way of working or a new North-South divide?
Executive Summary

Kenneth King

A brief historical context for Knowledge Management
Knowledge management [KM] (sometimes called knowledge sharing [KS]) is a very recent phenomenon in development assistance agencies (1996-2000). Its origins lie in two sources: a) developments in the private corporate sector, which were themselves driven by concerns with higher productivity and competitiveness, and b) the massive potential of the new information communication technologies associated with the internet, which allow enormous quantities of knowledge (or indeed information) to be accumulated and synthesised.

We shall first review where the notion of the 'knowledge agency' fits within the historical trajectory of development aid and then list a number of associated initiatives in knowledge-based aid. Finally, some more general issues are considered which concern the implications of this new knowledge discourse in the North for the parallel agency discourse about partnership with the South and the ownership of policy development by the South.

Against the 40 year history of 'development assistance' by many bilateral and multilateral organisations, it is worth examining why it is only in the last very few years that knowledge (and, indeed, information) suddenly need to be managed or shared in such explicit ways.

The emergence of this knowledge account comes at almost the same time in the agency world as the focus on the OECD DAC International Development Targets, the Comprehensive Development Framework, and the interest in Sector Wide Approaches. In combination these speak to a stronger confidence within Northern agencies about the need for coherent and co-ordinated strategies for the reduction of poverty in Southern countries. But, equally, these developments coincide with the increasing salience of the role of partnership between North and South, and the alleged centrality of Southern ownership of the overall development process.

It might have been anticipated that this partnership and country ownership emphasis in aid thinking would have led to a powerful concern with the role and development of Southern knowledge and research.

In practice, it has been the World Bank that has taken the lead role, since 1996, in knowledge management and knowledge sharing rather than bilateral assistance agencies such as DFID (UK) and JICA (Japan), or the other multi-lateral agencies. Arguably, the Bank's model of KM/KS has been very influential with other agencies, both bi- and multi-lateral. In the very late 1990s and especially during 2000, many agencies have embraced varieties of KM approach. These would include UNDP, UNICEF, CIDA, IDRC, SDC, Sida, DFID, BMZ, EU, IDB, JICA and Danida. Recently, KM has also become a feature of several major NGOs such as OXFAM UK.

One of the main instruments associated with knowledge sharing in the World Bank and later in other agencies has been the 'community of practice', also called the thematic group, or the learning network. Like their counterparts in the private corporate world, these have been encouraged to marry their own often very substantial deposits of personal project knowledge with the agency-wide systematisation and synthesis of sectoral and cross-sectoral knowledge through ICTs. Agency intranets have been important vehicles for this networking. These communities of practice have tended initially to involve agency staff only, though sometimes cutting across traditional departments, but several thematic groups, for example in the World Bank, now have non-agency partners, the majority of which are located in OECD countries rather than the South.

There are two other global initiatives for knowledge sharing with the developing world and with the international development community which seem likely to work rather differently from the new knowledge management systems of most of the agencies.

a) The Global Development Network (GDN)
This is just 12 months old, as a formal organisation, and its main concern is with bridging the research-policy divide in development, and with building capacity in the South. It sees its primary constituency as the research institutes, think tanks and policy-makers in the developing world. Although initiated from the World Bank, its principal geographical focus has continued to be a series of regional hubs in the South, even if there have developed research links to the OECD, and database links to Northern resources.

b) The Global Development Gateway (GDG)
This is at the heart of the World Bank President's vision of a "Knowledge Bank". Though still at a pilot stage in late 2000, the ambitious concept of an enormous hyper-market where all knowledge about development - international and national - can be accessed, has proved controversial, and not least because of concerns about the kind of 'expert' knowledge that would become so readily accessible. Ensuring meaningful Southern participation in the massive knowledge centralisation of the Gateway is likely to prove problematic.

Some continuing challenges for knowledge based aid.

This bald summary of the intriguing world of knowledge management or knowledge sharing in the agencies should be concluded by pointing to a number of issues for further research, and a few challenges to those directly involved in the area of agency knowledge sharing.

By far the largest intellectual hurdle we have noted as the agencies scramble to become learning organisations is what we have termed, in the full paper, the agency-centricity of their knowledge preoccupations. With just a very few exceptions, we would argue that this initiative is being carried on for the immediate advantage of the agencies, and only down the line might it incorporate the natural partners of aid organisations in the developing world.

We have hinted that the reason for this misplaced focus on the agency has been the temptation to regard the development agency as just another multinational firm rather than as a unique organisation mandated to develop something other than itself.

The result has been that the agencies have not started with the dramatic knowledge deficits of the South, nor with the key question of how knowledge management could assist knowledge development in the South. A continuation along their present trajectory will arguably be counter-productive; it could make agencies more certain of what they themselves have learnt, and more enthusiastic that others should share these insights, once they have been systematised.

The agencies' current knowledge focus has not been systematically evaluated, nor have the various assumptions underpinning their KM and KS strategies been seriously interrogated.

An alternative approach is still eminently possible, since the exercises in knowledge management are still very much at the exploratory stage in many agencies such as JICA and DFID. But it really consists of turning the present approach to the knowledge agency on its head.

Instead of asking yet more questions about how lessons learned by the agency could be further synthesised, we could start at the other end and ask how joint involvement in agency knowledge projects could better build knowledge in the South. To do this effectively, it would be essential to have a much more elaborate account of knowledge bases and knowledge systems in the South.

Instead of wondering how to ensure that Northern research and policy directories, data-bases, training systems could be placed more conspicuously on agency webs, or even on the Gateway, agencies, with their unique mandate to develop the South, could ask many more conditioning questions about how Northern expertise could be obliged much more symmetrically to partner the South.

This is a question that has not been systematically applied to the enormously rich Northern knowledge resources on the South. And these are not just the agency data-bases and knowledge networks but also the very considerable Northern NGO resources of knowledge on the South. How can they be leveraged more effectively so that knowledge development occurs somewhat more symmetrically in the South?

The missing condition of Southern involvement in the agencies' current knowledge management could be extended and applied to much else that the agencies have undertaken in recent years. For instance, it could asked of the key policy objectives of the OECD/DAC - the International Development Targets (IDTs) - which have become so central to JICA and to DFID policies, to what extent are they really in any sense owned by the nations of the South? And it could also be asked of the many hundreds of evaluation reports by the agencies, which are set to become one of the key sources of lesson learning in agencies' knowledge management strategies, How many of these really succeeded in incorporating the joint participation of the South in the evaluation process?

It is still perhaps not too late, therefore, to seek to ensure that the knowledge management being initiated now in many OECD capital cities genuinely becomes a form of knowledge developed jointly with those with whom it is most centrally concerned. If this were to happen, then the knowledge management revolution could really become a gateway to 'a new way of working' and not just one more passing aid fashion.

References

Kenneth King and Lene Buchert 1998 Changing international aid to education NORRAG & UNESCO Press, Paris

Kenneth King, 2000, 'Knowledge-based aid: a new way of working, or a new North-South divide?' paper to JICA/University of Hiroshima seminar on Knowledge-based aid, Tokyo, September 2000. Also available on http://www.ed.ac.uk/~centas/futgov-home.html.

Kenneth King and Simon McGrath, 2000a, 'The knowledge agency: the impact of the new knowledge theory on the work and understandings of development cooperation agency staff', Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Also available on http://www.ed.ac.uk/~centas/futgov-home.html.

Kenneth King and Simon McGrath, 2000b, 'Who is in the driving seat? Development cooperation and democracy' paper to British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE), September, Birmingham. Also available on http://www.ed.ac.uk/~centas/futgov-home.html