By Jawed Ludin
BONDJanuary, 2003
At the dawn of the new millenium", reads a World Bank report, "knowledge and information are becoming key factors of development". This kind of rhetoric, coming from the world's leading development financier, signifies the emergence of a new era, the era of ‘knowledge-based' development. The new paradigm seems to define development in terms of not only the transfer of resources between North and South, but also the transfer of knowledge. There appears to be a growing emphasis on the so-called ‘Indigenous Knowledge' as "a signficant resource ... for the development praocess".
So where does the new paradigm leave NGOs? Given their insitutional flexibility, as well as their well-grounded experience, NGOs are generally better placed than donors and bilaterals to harness knowledge and learn from development practice. The extensive partnerships that northern NGOs, for example, enter into with various southern actors - from the community and CBOs upwards to governments and multilaterals - are fertile grounds for generating development knowledge.
The reality on the ground, however, is somewhat unpromising. In a recent survey that BOND undertook, NGOs identified the barriers to effective learning to include 1) the absence of openness to change; 2) lack of organisational strategy and a systematic approach; and 3) an unstable resource base. Thus, while there appears to be a growing emphasis on the importance of learning, the dominant attitudes and practices of NGOs have not seen much change. Some crucial areas of learning, notably those pertaining to partnerships between North and South - eg local experience, local perspetives, differences in history, poverty, and so on - continue to be highly undervalued.
Evidently, it would be untrue to argue that learning is entirely absent from development practice. Learning between South and North does indeed take place - in fact it always has. Southern experience has greatly influenced northern thinking about microfinance, the PLA and gender analysis, to name a few examples (Poudyal, 2000. SCF). A great deal of tacit learning is also embedded in the normal procedures of NGOs, be they annual reports or monitoring and evaluation processes. Besides, NGOs have always valued and advocated learning that leads to efficiency and financial accountability, such as project writing, monitoring, report, etc. (Drew, 2002)
Having said this, the picture is often more complex than we seem to think. Some honest analysts do point out the ‘not so uncommon' practice in the North of extracting ideas and information from the South, analysing and repackaging these and then presenting them as their own. (Drew, 2002). NGOs are not alone in this, progressive researchers may also be guilty of this.
On the other hand, what sometimes passes for North-South learning may not necessarily be genuine learning but simply adoption by southern actors of northern prescriptions. That is why, perhaps, that we sometimes see striking uniformity in certain development practices across different parts of the world. Where project templates are prescribed from the North, southerners are often led to simply adopt them, rather than apply and adapt them (Drew, 2002). Hence the role of power dynamics in hindering effective learning, which is a crucial subject and merits an article on its own.
Finally, it remains to point out the dilemma of ‘competition vs co-operation' and its impact on learning in development. The new development paradigm will not only require an openness to change, but also an openness to share. Knowledge, unless it is validated, shared and reapplied, does not lead to learning. ‘Pressure for positivity', ie. the need to share positive lessons only, is an NGO habit that should become a thing of the past.
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