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Notes sent to the authors
A proposal for a volume on “Dialogue in
Pursuit of Development”
321
During recent years there has been great interest in the interaction between
the different parties of an aid relationship. This issue has become the most
important parameter in the rapidly increasing research on development aid,
be it on aid effectiveness, aid dependence or on learning in development
co-operation.
EGDI recently commissioned a study on learning in development cooperation.
In the study learning is seen as a process of interaction between
organisations, through which lessons from experience are accumulated, synthesised
and brought into the development of policies, activities and work
modalities. This study as well as many others assume that knowledge is possible
to disseminate from one party in the aid relationship – mostly presumed
to be the donor party – to the other. What is known from all these
studies is, if it all materialises, it is a very difficult and tedious process. The
constraints for transfer of knowledge and thereby learning are many and
complex, but will not be repeated here. Suffice to say that the learning
process in development co-operation offers its own complication in addition
to the ones of relationships in general.
Aid is a relationship between basically two parties – a donor and a recipient.
The effectiveness of development co-operation therefore depends largely
on the quality of this relationship. It is a complex relationship characterised
by huge differences in the terms and conditions by which the parties collaborate
with each other. Since donors and recipients have very different
roles and positions within the structures of aid, what they consider important
to learn may differ in some, but not all, respects. If the propose of
learning is improving the effectiveness of aid, then learning becomes an
issue which cannot be confined to one party only. Effective learning does
require that both parties learn and that they have an opportunity to share
their experiences and jointly work out an agenda of action (Carlsson and
Wohlgemuth, 2000). 1
The term “dialogue” stands for the methodology of interaction between
the donor and recipient. At best, it is the instrument for formulating the
1 Carlsson, Jerker and Lennart Wohlgemuth (eds), 2000, Learning in Development Co-operation,
EGDI 2000:2, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International.