Partnerships for Capacity Building and Quality ... - ADEA

cross-cultural contexts. There are two issues here:! The scope for analytical policy making is inevitably limited and must allowroom for politics to the degree that the analytical methods and results we have(i) are fallible and everybody believes so, (ii) cannot wholly resolve conflictsof value and interests, (iii) are too slow and costly to produce, and (iv) cannottell us conclusively what to do and how to do it. 11 Modesty is very much inorder as partners search for policies that are “correct” and will work. 12 It isimportant to focus on what works in practice, not in theory.! Since practice is local, much of the knowledge and understanding needed toplan and guide it are contextually specific. We know that effective teachingand institutional behavior are linked to cultural factors. Much valid and usefulknowledge is contextually-bound, intuitive and intrinsic to the settings of dailypractice. Although this may appear as subjective to some, such knowledgehas deep roots in experience and is invaluable for policy making.Insofar as education policy formulation and its related activities areknowledge-based, these issues have clear implications for the nature of partnershipsdevoted to tackling such issues. All too often, donor-funded projects andpolicies have been based on donor-conceived and generated knowledge. Samoffshows that, at times, this knowledge and its mastery have remained within theagencies with little-to-no country ownership. This may be a function of theprocesses by which relevant knowledge is defined and identified. Naudet pointsout that a perverse effect of ignoring local knowledge is that too many developmentprojects tend to focus on “solutions” to poorly identified problems. Thissituation is exacerbated when the “solutions” are of the “one-size-fits-all” variety.This demonstrates the need to develop strategies and methods to ensure that:(i) the implementing partners are intimately involved in theknowledge-generation processes from beginning to end so that they have thecapacity to fully use the knowledge and reproduce it in the future; and (ii) thecontextual knowledge possessed by local actors is taken into account. Withoutaddressing these points there will be neither sustainability nor national ownershipof agency-financed development programs. The paper by Dembele showsthat similar forces are at work when looking at partnerships between educationministries and teachers. In other words, when it comes to systematic, analyticalunderstandings of education systems and their problems, it is necessary to poolintellectual and knowledge resources, with each partner recognizing the com-11. D. R Evans (ed.), 1994; D. R. Evans, R. Sack & C. P. Shaw, 1996. Lindblom, C. E. & Woodhouse,E. J., 1993.12. It is useful to keep in mind a comment by Herbert Simon who has argued that “The capacity ofthe human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared withthe size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in thereal world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.” Herbert ASimon, 1957.INTRODUCTION: MAKING PARTNERSHIP WORK 17