D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 4, July/August 2000, p. 8-11)

The World Bank has taken a major initiative in bringing together research institutes and think tanks to promote global knowledge exchange. The first conference was held in Bonn in December 1999 with participation of experts and scientists from all over the world. The keynote address by Joseph Stiglitz set out the new thinking in the World Bank on knowledge transfer.

The World Bank’s initiative in fostering the Global Development Network (GDN) is part of the idea of the Bank as a “Knowledge Bank”. We have come to appreciate the transformative power of knowledge in development. Yet we must be wary of simple analogies between a “knowledge bank” and a “money bank”. Disembodied knowledge has the characteristics of a public good, while money is the quintessential private good.

The internet has in practice brought knowledge access closer to the ideal of a global public good. The communication revolution has made great strides in facilitating communication within countries and has also enhanced the ability of developing and transitional countries to tap into the global pool of codified knowledge. The internet should prove to be a tool of immense power in sharing knowledge within our network of GDN institutes.

Today, developing countries face both great risks and great opportunities. Internet growth has been most rapid in the United States, and not surprisingly, slowest in the less developed countries. The enhanced ability to share and acquire knowledge in the advanced industrialised countries may increase the knowledge gap, resulting in the less developed countries becoming even more disadvantaged.

At the same time, they can tap into a larger knowledge pool than they ever had access to before. Today, a child anywhere in the world who has access to the internet has a modern “Alexandria Library” at her fingertips. It is too soon to see how these opportunities and forces - for convergence or divergence - will play out, whether the knowledge gap between developed and developing countries will be widened or narrowed. But it is clear that it is incumbent upon the developing and transitional countries to do everything they can to enhance their ability to tap into the reservoir of global knowledge.

Knowledge has a number of characteristics which differentiate it from ordinary goods. We have already noted the global public goods nature of knowledge. I see a role far more subtle than just the technology-driven visions of “downloading” global knowledge - as useful as that may be. I want to argue three main theses:

1. the overwhelming variety and complexity of human societies requires the localisation of knowledge;
   
2. practical know-how is largely tacit knowledge that needs to be learned by horizontal methods of twinning, apprenticeship, and seconding; and
   
3. each society, through its knowledge institutions, should take the active role (“in the driver’s seat”) in the local learning process.

General versus local knowledge

We will analyse knowledge along two dimensions, the general-local dimension and the explicit-implicit dimension. Global public knowledge exemplifies knowledge that is general and explicit. As we move along these dimensions, we will see the different roles of central as well as local knowledge institutions. We start with the general-local dimension.

Money “travels” better than knowledge. General knowledge is knowledge that holds across countries, cultures, and times; local knowledge takes account of the specifics of place, people, and time. “Every man is mortal” is general knowledge, while “Drive on the left” is a best practice in London, but not in New York. A “best practice” might work well in some countries but fail miserably when recommended in other contexts.

In questions of institutional development, it is very difficult to know a priori just how general is a “best practice”. Prudent counsel is to scan locally for best practices but to test them locally since local adaptation often amounts to reinventing the “best practice” in a new context. The Knowledge Bank can “scan globally”; the GDN partners have to “reinvent locally”.

Many “visiting economists” have painfully discovered that “the devil is in the (local) details”. It is the local component of knowledge that requires adaptation - which in turn requires the active participation of those who know and understand the institutional environment. Local adaptation cannot be done by passive recipients of “development knowledge”; it must be done by the “doers of development” in the course of their activities.

There are two points here: the necessity that knowledge be made locally applicable and that the adaptation be done by the local “doers of development” (not given as a gift or imposed as a conditionality from outside). It is the local selection, assimilation, and adaptation of knowledge that local doers “make it their own”. Even by taking a machine or device apart and putting it back together again, one can more “make it one’s own” even if there is little adaptation or redesign. Those of us who have been teachers are familiar with this principle: successful teaching requires active learning.

In the context of development, where what is involved is “social learning” and adaptation, more is entailed: it is not just a matter of being open or closed to outside knowledge; it is a matter of being open to outside knowledge in a way that reaffirms one’s autonomy. For Gandhi, this was intellectual swaraj (self-rule or autonomy): “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet.” Only by remaining “on one’s feet” from an intellectual standpoint can the local doers have the self-confidence to select, assimilate, and adapt the external knowledge - instead of being overwhelmed and rendered intellectually dependent and subservient.

Considerable effort is required to adapt development knowledge to local conditions and culture. The research institutes and policy institutes of the GDN are examples of local knowledge institutions that can play an important role.

Development institutions have sometimes tried a “quicker” transplant method. After a quick trip to a country, the standard wisdom (in earlier days, typically, the Washington consensus) is conveyed, often with little attempt even to nuance it to the economic, political and social situations of the country. The policy advice would frequently be backed up by conditionalities on policy-lending to motivate the country to implement the best-practice recipes - indeed given the lack of broad-based buy-in, and often the unsuitability of the advice to the country’s situation, conditionality was the only way of having the advice followed. Occasionally, in an attempt to achieve broader-based support, experts might come in to give a longer senior policy seminar to local government officials; the experts then return home hoping that their sound advice will take root. Yet, this policy reform process is designed to promote neither active learning nor lasting institutional change. As these reforms were externally imposed rather than actively appropriated by the country, there was often little “ownership” of the reforms. Compliance might be only perfunctory; the “quick” transplant might soon wither and die.

Local policy and research institutions can be seen as organisations who carefully adapt and prepare a transplanted policy initiative to survive and perhaps thrive in the local environment. It takes longer, but the roots are better prepared for the local soil. The political process of changing policies and implementing new ideas is usually rather messy and in need of “high maintenance” support. The officials or parliamentarians constantly need more information and advice - more backup, more thinking about how best to adapt the policies to local circumstances - in order to carry out the policy reforms. As a result of this process of adaptation, which often involves virtually reinventing the idea perhaps by finding and emphasising local antecedents, the government officals see the policy reform not as a foreign imposition but as a local product which addresses their needs and which they can sponsor.

Advisors from developed countries or international organisations may not always fully appreciate these problems. The “knowledge business” has its own political economy. Those who are legitimated in their expertise, prestige, and privileges by the “universality” of their message are disinclined to recognise limitations and subtleties in the local applicability of their technical expertise. Novel complexity, genuine uncertainty, conflict of values, unique circumstance, and structural instabilities are all down played or ignored since they might diminish the perceived potency of the expertise and undercut the client’s faith in that potency. On the other side, the client may want the security and comfort of being in the hands of the professional expert who will solve the perplexing problems. These are some of the strong institutional forces to underappreciate the subtleties of local knowledge, to hamper the growth of autonomous client ownership, and to stymie the development of indigenous local knowledge institutions.

Codified versus tacit knowledge

Now we move to the explicit-implicit or codified-tacit dimension of knowledge. Explicit or codified knowledge is knowledge that can be spoken, written, and codified to be saved on a computer disk or transmitted over a telephone line. But we know more than we can say. We know how to ride a bike, to recognise a face, or tell a grammatical sentence in our native language, but we would be hard put to turn this knowledge into explicit or codified knowledge to archive in a database for dissemination over the internet.

The same holds a fortiori for “social technologies” or institutions. In a codified description of a “best practice” case study, the uncodified tacit knowledge is often “the rest of the iceberg”. Some tacit knowledge might be transformed into codified knowledge so that it could be transferred by conventional methods. But the remaining tacit knowledge needs to be transmitted by special methods such as apprenticeship, secondments, imitation, study tours, cross-training, twinning relations, and genuine learning-by-doing. These methods of transferring tacit knowledge will be called “horizontal” methods of knowledge transfer - in contrast to “vertical” methods where knowledge can be codified, transmitted to a central repository or library, and then accessed by interested parties.

We have seen two reasons why the theory of “downloading the best practice” fails: the best practice needs to be localised and much of the best practice may be in the form of practical know-how that cannot be downloaded. But there is still an important role for international development agencies (global knowledge): Even concerning that tacit dimension of the best practice, the central agency may know who knows X without knowing X itself. It is “second-order” knowledge of where the practical knowledge is; it is a “pointer” to the practical knowledge. A central agency can fruitfully play a match-making, facilitating, and brokering role in horizontal learning - not a direct training role. In particular, the Knowledge Bank is in a good position to “scan globally” to identify good practices, and then it can play a brokerage role to facilitate a horizontal learning process between the developing countries facing certain problems and the countries with successful practices. It can perform another role: certifying the quality of the messengers and messages; in a noisy world, with many alternative theories vying for center stage, there needs to be some ways of sorting through the cacaphony, establishing credibility.

The various methods of horizontal learning differ substantially from those employed in traditional classroom settings, where what goes on is “vertical” teaching and training in explicit codified knowledge.

• Study tours arranged by local knowledge institutes allow people to “see how it is done” in nearby societies.
  
• Cross-training is being “shown how to do it” by those who have already “done it” particularly in nearby societies. It is the implicit knowledge alternative to being explicitly “told how to do it” by an international expert.
  
• Twinning or secondments pair together similar organisations or institutions for a horizontal transfer of know-how.
  
• Foreign direct investment might also be viewed as a method of horizontal learning. For instance, a major source of learning about lean production met hods and their adaptation to American culture was Japanese direct investment in production facilities in the United States.

Active social learning

My third thesis is that the knowledge institutes and policy-makers of developing countries should play an active role in reappropriating and adapating knowledge for development.

The contrasting “standard view” (usually held implicitly rather than espoused explicitly) sees a central authority transmitting universal messages and best practices formulas along a transmission belt to passive clients who are encouraged by aid and constrained by conditionalities to “get the message”. Rather than encouraging clients to develop their analytical and research capacities, the process of imposing conditionalities undermines both the incentives to acquire those capacities and clients’ confidence in their ability to use them. Rather than involving large segments of society in a process of discussing change - thereby changing their ways of thinking - excessive conditionality reinforces traditional hierarchical relationships. Rather than empowering those who could serve as catalysts for change within these societies, it demonstrates their impotence. Rather than promoting the kind of open dialogue that is central to democracy, it argues at best that such dialogue is unnecessary, at worst that it is counterproductive.

That standard view of delivering knowledge for development leads to an impairment of the self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-efficacy of the clients. The message behind the “main messages” is that the clients are unable to take charge of their own learning process and to find out these things in their own way. They need to be “helped” - to be shown the way. New forms of intellectual colonialism are masked as “quality control”. But these ways in which the standard methodology “shows them the way” only reinforces the clients’ passivity and perceived lack of self-efficacy.

The obvious corollary of the traditional mode of operation is that there will be very little learning in the sense of correcting mistakes at the level of the development agency. Once there is a public commitment of the agency to a certain view, then the agency’s prestige and “brand name” is on the line. Any untoward consequences of the policies must be due to flawed implementation on the part of the clients. Criticism from outside the agency can usually be ignored, and criticism from within the agency must be suppressed because it would weaken the francise value of the brand name and “confuse” the clients. But note that in defending their own autonomy, they undermine the autonomy of the very countries they are supposed to help; even the language they use to defend the “no debate” position is one which connotes an aura of benevolent paternalism - but one which demonstrates a complete lack of faith in the country to make its own decisions.

Social learning and effective change cannot be imposed from outside. Indeed, the attempt to impose change from the outside is as likely to engender resistance and barriers to change as it is to facilitate change. At the heart of development is a transformation in ways of thinking, and individuals cannot be forced to change how they think. They can be induced to take certain actions, or even to utter certain words; but they cannot be forced to change their hearts and minds. To impose a model without a self-directed local learning process would be to “short circuit” and bypass the active learning capacity of the local policymakers and to promote a state of passivity, dependence and tutelage.