Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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These observations suggest that as we wrestle with notions of country led
development, we must recognize that (a) aid dependence and country led
development are incompatible and (b) as long as the heavy reliance on foreign
aid continues, the immediate task is to work on transparency and clarity
about roles rather than assuming that external agencies (‘development partners’)
have no interests or can ignore them or will subordinate their own
sense of what must be done to decisions of national education officials.
(vi) While improving the flow of information and development expertise is a
high priority objective, combining external funding and advice is inherently
problematic.
As I have noted, the World Bank and other agencies increasingly assert that
even more important than the funds they provide is their expertise and
advice. In practice, external support has nearly always carried conditions and
therefore advice. The current emphasis reflects the prominence of notions
of knowledge management within the World Bank and other agencies and
an understanding of what has come to be called the ‘knowledge era’, in
which information is deemed more important for economic growth and
development than land, labor, and capital.
While information of various sorts may come to play new roles, and while
strategies for developing, organizing, storing, and disseminating knowledge
will be affected by rapidly changing technologies, it is far from clear that
combining the provision of funds with the provision of authoritative claims
about what constitutes development knowledge and the institutionalization
of funding agencies as development advisory services will serve poor
countries well or will advance development co-operation.
The potential problems here are numerous and well beyond the scope of
this discussion (Samoff and Stromquist, 2001). Still, in a discussion of development
co-operation and partnership it is important to note briefly some
of the risks of this combination of funds and advice. What is deemed valid
and legitimate information (‘knowledge’) will become increasingly centralized
in the North. Information that is collected in the South will be shaped
and framed by its interpreters, that is, those who create and manage the
development knowledge databases and information systems. That powerful
role in determining what is and what is not knowledge will be obscured by
the mystique of science and scientific method. The centralization of the
determination of what is knowledge entrenches the role of the elite education
and research institutions in the world, nearly all located in the most
affluent countries. What is deemed to be the important knowledge is likely
to become more technical and less humanistic and critical. The projection of
broad, nearly universal access to web-based information databases underestimates
both current technical obstacles and cost and the likelihood that in
the current global system, the technological gap will increase, not decrease.