Somewhere in your community or organisation, groups of people already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find these areas of postive deviants and fan their flames.

At the moment, there’s a couple of  interesting discussions going on on (my favourite community) KM4Dev, and I think they’re related. They both started on 19 September: the first was initiated by Sebastiao Ferreira on learning from failure and the second by Ewen Le Borgne on positive deviants. I’m going to start with positive deviants and then look at the link to failure in a couple of blog posts because I have a lot to say on this subject…

A couple of years ago, Laxmi Prasad Pant and Helen Odame wrote a paper, The promise of positive deviants, for the KM4D Journal which had a big influence on me. I thought about this paper – like a dog chewing on a bone  – off and on for quite a while and even changed IKM Emergent’s communications strategy to reflect their insights into positive deviants. In particular, they highlighted the importance of positive deviants in the sphere of knowledge.

Pant and Odame considered that (agricultural) knowledge is managed in highly contested environments where uncertainty characterizes stakeholder interactions. One dimension of this this disorder are so-called positive deviants who act out against the structures and ‘rules of the game’ in knowledge creation, application and regeneration. Positive deviants as powerful agents of change and are, for example, able to bridge the divides between expert and local knowledge systems. However, positive deviants have not yet been recognized in terms of their potential in international development because the legacy of deviancy theory lies on negative deviants, such as addicts and criminals.

Pant and Odame argue that positive deviants initiate change in spite of difficult social and organizational  environments: full of unpredictable obstacles or interferences. Moreover, they believe that challenging the status quo is one way to harness individual creativity and innovations in spite of constraining social structures and institutional-setups. In other words, social structures impose constraints to individual agency or action, and that structure and agency are a duality that cannot be conceived separately from one another (Giddens, 1984). This resonantes with IKM Emergent which, on the one had, is trying to bring about change within development but, at the same time, is part of the strucutre which it is trying to change.

I think that the members of IKM Emergent – and those interested in IKM Emergent – can largely be identified as positive deviants. But this goes wider and I think many members of KM4Dev are positive deviants as well:

This is because positive deviants challenge existing organizational structures and institutional set-ups, and promote alternative approaches to solve seemingly intractable social problems, either playing direct role of a boundary spanner or indirect role as activists.

In my next post, I’ll be looking at the link between positive deviants and failure…

The new weblog on Linking knowledge domains

I’ve created a new blog on Linking knowledge domains: knowledge integration across boundarieswhich aims to act as an access point for work on cross-domain knowledge integration which I’ve been doing for IKM Emergent over the past few years in collaboration with Josine Stremmelaar of Hivos and Wenny Ho. In particular, it will link to the seminar which took place on 23-24 January 2012 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Background
One of the objectives of the journal when it was started in 2005 was ‘facilitating cross-fertilization between knowledge management and related fields’ by acting as a ‘broad church’ (Ferguson and Cummings 2005, unpublished). Indeed, one of the objectives was to bring the approaches of innovation management/systems for development (IM4Dev) and knowledge management for development (KM4D) closer together so that they could better inform each other although, in the language that we had available to us in 2005, we called this agricultural knowledge systems rather than IM4Dev or innovation systems. To quote from one of the unpublished background documents on reasons for starting the journal:

It will aim to facilitate cross-fertilization between knowledge management and related fields: for example information management, but also with other development-related approaches: agricultural knowledge systems, soft systems research, and other relevant ‘traditions’.

The rationale for bringing these two approaches closer together was that we thought at the time, intuitively, that KM4D could benefit from the insights of an approach which was grounded in development and which we had also identified as home-grown knowledge management. It is also fascinating to read in the Editorial how the different phases in IM4Dev correspond with the different generations of KM4D and that the Guest Editors consider that the approaches are complementary:

As becomes clear from the several articles, the perspectives of KM4D and IM4Dev do not seem that far apart, and have arrived for example at a similar understanding of the importance and influence of the institutional context for learning and innovation. They are complementary, and could benefit from further integration. Given their explicit focus on knowledge management, KM4D perspectives can help better understand the knowledge sharing and learning process that is crucial to innovation, and which underlies many of the other functions crucial to innovation such as lobbying, and the creation of an enabling environment. IM4Dev perspectives, with their attention to other resources than knowledge needed to feed the innovation process and create an enabling environment, broaden the view on the settings in which knowledge management aims to make a contribution.

One of the advantages of the IM4Dev approach is that it is focused outside organisations while one of the limitations of KM4D has been that, because it comes originally from the private sector, it was originally focused on knowledge inside organisations. Indeed, one of the original criticisms of knowledge-based aid from Kenneth King (2000, cited in Knowledge management: development strategy or business strategy? in 2001, p. 163) was:

The agencies have not started with the dramatic knowledge deficits of the South, nor with the key question of how knowledge management could assist knowledge development in the South. A continuation along their current trajectory will arguably be counter-productive; it will make agencies more certain of what they themselves have learnt, and more enthusiastic that others should share their insights, once they have been systematised.

IM4Dev, and the approaches it encompasses will help us to counteract this tendency which is still visible 11 years later.

PS Please note that I’m consciously using KM4D for the field, to differentiate it from the all important, and very much related KM4Dev community.

Paradigmatic elements and relationships associated with people as adaptive agents, with eclectic and participatory methodologies, and with ontological assumptions of complexity such as non-linearity, unpredictability and emergence. (2010, p. 7)

Many of the distinguishing characteristics of IKM Emergent fit within this tradition of adaptive pluralism such as its methods and procedures which are ‘pluralist, iterative adaptation, a la carte and combinations; which have ontological origins and assumptions based on people, the social world, complexity science, emergence, and non-linearity; and which involve goals, design and indicators which are negotiated, evolving and emergent (2010, p. 44). IKM Emergent has been taking place in a context in the development sector which is largely dominated by the neo-Newtonian paradigm which are ‘supervising, auditing, controlling, conforming, complying’. But in agreement with Chambers, we understand that:

 So in the name of rigour and accountability what fits and works better in the controllable, predictable, standardised and measurable conditions of the things and procedures paradigm has been increasingly applied to the uncontrollable, unpredictable, diverse and less measurable paradigm of people and processes. The misfit is little perceived by those furthest from field realities and with most power. (2010, p. 14)

In one of Robert Chamber’s blog posts on this subject Whose paradigm counts part 2, he has made two figures which describe different aspects of the two paradigms: concepts and ontological assumptions; values and principles; relationships; methods. procedures and processes; and roles and behaviours. I have also tried to do the same for IKM Emergent. From this exercise, I realsied that although IKM does fall in the general category of adaptive pluralism, some of its specific emphases are quite different.

IKM mindsets, orientations and predispositions (adapted from Chambers)

A discussion about this figure (left) led us to the conclusion that values are very important to our work but that we very rarely talk about them or even consider them explicitly. One of the really good things of taking this lense to examine your work is that implicit mindsets, orientations and predispositions suddenly become much clear, and can even be part of a process of negotiation.

Jaap Pels was present at the meeting via skype and I know he had some additions to this figure so this is an invitation for his comments .

Mulling over these issues after the meeting, as one does, I was thinking that there should be another circle in the figure called ”Intentions” because that is at the roots of everything we are doing. For IKM, and myself, I would think that intentions would be: reforming, more pluralistic, more open, more inclusive, more respectful, more creative. In fact, I’ll have a go at re-drawing this figure with the new circle when I’ve had Jaap’s reflections on what still needs to be added.

Now I have started thinking about the ”intentions” circle for the neo-Newtonian paradigm and I am worried that they might be the same as the ones I’ve listed here. But, then again, I think they’re more likely to be: value for money, control, efficiency. Not that I don’t think these are important, they’re just not my core intentions.

There were 6 editors who took part in the exchange, five of whom are journal editors:
Wendy Harcourt – Development
Kees Biekart – Development and Change
Brian Pratt – Development in Practice
Caroline Sweetman – Gender and Development
Robert Cornford – Oxfam Books
me – Knowledge Management for Development Journal (KM4D Journal)

When it was my turn to talk, I introduced the KM4D Journal and gave some background on how the journal has developed. It is the youngest journal of them all – then in its 7th volume – and it has, unusually, gone from being an Open Journal System journal to one published by the commercial publisher, Taylor and Francis.

After introducing the journal, I very briefly presented some research on development journals that I’ve been doing with Iina Hellsten of the VU University. Iina and I are doing a scientometric analysis of top development journals. As part of this, I presented a few slides showing our preliminary results in which we had considered the institutional and country location of authors of three development journals, based on a sub-set of articles concerned with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for the years 2005-2008: namely World Development, the Journal of Development Studies and Development and Change.

This first slide reviews the institutional affiliations of authors. It shows (and I hope you can read it) that these journals are dominated by Northern institutions, both universities and international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Of the institutions listed here, only one, namely the University of Delhi, could be described as a Southern institution.

Our next slide is concerned with the location of the authors in terms of country. Here, you can see the dominance of authors located in the North, and particularly the USA (green) and the UK (blue). This dominance becomes even clearer when we look at the third and final slide in which the authors for World Development are divided between the developed and developing world.

These slides show a reality of development journals being dominated by Northern interests and authors. As I then concluded, this picture makes me doubt the role of development journals as being developmental.

Not for the first time when I’ve presented these results, I received some angry reactions. One participant argued that this was not a problem because authors in the South have their own journals and didn’t need access to the journals in my study. Another argued that although most of the authors are located in the North, they may well be Southerners, and that this undermined my argument. And that my approach was patronising to Southern academics.

As you can imagine, I was getting very worried and upset at this point, wondering if I was indeed chasing an irrelevant red herring…

But then, fortunately for me, Olivier Sagna of CODESRIA was in the audience. He argued that the difficulty of publishing in international journals was perceived as a huge problem by many African academics. He was also of the opinion that the fact that some of the authors were Southerners based in the North did not change the overall impression of bias. He noted that the brilliance of some Southern scholars was not recognised until they caught international attention by attaining senior positions in the North. When this happened, they found it easy to publish in international journals but before this, they had been just as good but had not been recognised.

Please see the full report of the panel, written by Wendy Harcourt.

In a nutshell, I think this aspect of ‘viewing the world as a spectacle’ is one of the reasons why I have a basic dislike of traditional definitions of development, covered in the presentation above. Many of these approaches and definitions are technical and fundamentally objectifying. In a different league is Amartya Sen’s definition of development in his book Development as freedom as:

For me, my preferred definition is the one in the 2009 paper The New Enlightenment article by Sebastiao Ferreira, a Brazilian citizen living in Peru who I had the great pleasure of meeting at a conference in September 2011. He argues that:

Development is, most of all, the result of the synergy among millions of innovative initiatives people take everyday in their local societies, generating new and more effective ways of producing, trading, and managing their resources and their institutions. The work of policy makers and development agencies may contribute greatly to the success of those initiatives, may shape them, or may undermine those efforts.

This also relates to Robin Mansell’s vision of development in her 2010 publication Power and interests in developing knowledge societies: exogenous and endogenous discourses in contention which proposes the need for an endogenous, internally generated development as opposed to external, exogenous one:

…an endogenous model of development, one that focuses more directly on human beings and their resources and aspirations. The endogenous model is greatly overshadowed by the exogenous model in policy discourses. This has serious consequences – socially, culturally and economically – because the exogenous model (and indeed some versions of the endogenous model), cloaks the interests of investors in the global North‘ whose principal ambition is profits from the sale of digital technologies and the content that is hosted on or circulated through them.

Day 2 of the final IKM workshop dedicated to ‘practice-based change’. As much as on day 1, there is a lot on the menu of this second day:

• Individual agency vs. organisational remit;
• Accountability;
• Impact and change pathways;
• A possible extension of the programme: IKM-2

On individual agency and organisational remit:

We are made of a complex set of imbricated identities and cultures that manifest themselves around us in relation with the other actors that we are engaging with. These complex layers of our personality may clash with the organisational remit that is sometimes our imposed ‘ball park’. Recognising complexity at this junction, and the degree of influence of individual agents is an important step forward to promote more meaningful and effective development.

Pressed for time, we did not talk a lot about this. Yet we identified a few drivers that have much resonance in development work:

• As little as organisations tweet, people do, organisations do not trigger change, individual people do. Pete Cranston mentioned a study done about three cases of critical change within Oxfam, all triggered by individuals: a manager with the power to change, an aspirational individual quickly building an alliance etc. – our impact pathways need to recognise the unmistakable contribution of individual ‘change agents’ (or positive deviants) in any specific process or generic model of social change. Individuals that are closely related to resource generation obviously have crucial leverage power and play a special role in the constellation of agents that matter in the impact pathway;
• We are obscured by our scale: In politics it took us a long time to realise there were crucial dynamics below nation-states and above them. In a similar swing, in development let’s go beyond merely the organisational scale to focus on the individual agency as well as the network scale – all organisations and individuals are part of various networks which impact both individuals and organisations engaged in them. Teams also play an important role to explore and implement new ways – it is at that level that trust is most actively built and activities planned and implemented. The riddles of impact from the teams emulate in sometimes mysterious ways to the organisational level;
• These differences of scale tend to place subtle tensions on individuals between their personal perspectives and the organisational priorities. The multiple identities and knowledges (including local knowledge) are inherently in ourselves too, adding layers of complexity as the predominance of one identity layer over another plays out in relation to the other people around – see presentation by Valerie Brown.

On 20 and 21 February 2012, the  London-based Wellcome Collection is the stage for the final workshop organised by the Information Knowledge Management Emergent (IKM-Emergent or ‘IKM-E’) programme. Ten IKM-E members are looking at the body of work completed in the past five years in this DGIS-funded research programme and trying to unpack four key themes that are interweaving the work of the three working groups which have been active in the programme:

1. Linearity and predictability;
2. Participation and engagement;
3. Individual agency and organisational remit;
4. Accountability

This very rich programme is also a tentative intermediary step towards a suggested extension for the programme.

In this post I’m summarising quite a few of the points mentioned during the first day of the workshop, covering the first two points on the list above.

On linearity and predictability:

Linear approaches to development – suggesting that planning is a useful exercise to map out and follow a predictable causal series of events – are delusional and ineffective and we have other perspectives that can help plan with a higher degree of realism, if not certainty.

Linearity and predictability strongly emphasise the current (and desired alternative) planning tools that we have at our disposal or are sometimes forced to use, and the relation that we entertain with the actors promoting these specific planning tools.

Planning tools

After trying out so many ineffective approaches for so long, it seems clear thataspirational intent might act as a crucial element to mitigate some of the negative effects of linearity and predictability. Planning tools can be seen as positivist, urging a fixed and causal course of events, indeed focusing on one highlighted path – as is too often the case with the practice around logical framework – or can have an aspirational nature, in which case they focus on the end destination or the objective hoped for and strive to test out the assumptions underlying a certain pathway to impact (at a certain time).

Different situations require different planning approaches. Following the Cynefin framework approach, we might be facing simple, complicated, complex or chaotic situations and we will not respond the same way to each of those. A complex social change process may require planning that entails regular or thorough consultation from various stakeholder groups, a (more) simple approach such as an inoculation campaign may just require ‘getting on with the job’ without a heavy consultation process.

At any rate, planning mechanisms are one thing but the reality on the ground is often different and putting a careful eye to co-creating reality on the ground is perhaps the best approach to ensure a stronger and more realistic development, reflecting opportunities and embracing natural feedback mechanisms (the reality call).

There are strong power lobbies that might go against this intention. Against such remote control mechanisms – sometimes following a tokenistic approach to participation though really hoarding discretionary decision-making power – we need  distanced control checks and balances, hinting at accountability.

Managing the relationship leading to planning mechanisms

Planning tools are one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is the relationship that you maintain with the funding or managing agency that requires you to use these planning tools.

Although donor agencies might seem like ‘laggards’ in some way, managing the relationship with them implies that we should not stigmatise their lack of flexibility and insufficient will to change. In a more optimistic way, managing our relationship with them may also mean that we need to move away from the contractual nature of the relations that characterise much of development work.

Ways to influence that relationship include among others seeking evidence and using evidence that we have (e.g. stories of change, counter-examples from the past either from one’s own past practice or from others’ past practice etc.) and advocating it. Process documentation is crucial here to demonstrate the evidence around the value of process work and the general conditions under which development interventions have been designed and implemented. It is our duty to negotiate smart monitoring and evaluation in the intervention, including e.g.  process documentation, the use of a theory of change and about the non instrumentalisation (in a way that logical frameworks have been in the past). In this sense, tools do not matter much as such; practice behind the tools matters a lot more.

Finally, still, there is much importance in changing relationships with the donor to make the plan more effective: trust is central to effective relationships. And we can build trust with donors by reaching out to them: if they need some degree of predictability, although we cannot necessarily offer it, we can try, talk about our intent to reduce uncertainty. However, most importantly, in the process we are exposing them to uncertainty and forcing them to deal with it, which helps them feel more comfortable with uncertainty and paradox and find ways to deal with it. Convincing donors and managers about this may seem like a major challenge at first, but then again, every CEO or manager knows that their managing practice does not come from a strict application of ‘the golden book of management’. We all know that reality is more complex than we would like it to be. It is safe and sound management practice to recognise the complexity and the .

Perhaps also, the best way to manage our relationship with our donors in a not-so-linear-not-so-predictable way is to lead by example: by being a shining living example of our experience and comfort with a certain level of uncertainty, and showing that recognising the complexity and the impossibility to predict a certain course of events is a sound and realistic management approach to development. Getting that window of opportunity to influence based on our own example depends much on the trust developed with our donors.

Trust is not only a result of time spent working and discussing together but also the result ofsurfacing the deeper values and principles that bind and unite us (or not). The conception of development as being results-based or relationship-based influences this, and so does the ‘funding time span’ in which we implement our initiatives.

Time and space, moderating and maintaining the process

The default development cooperation and funding mechanism is the project, with its typically limited lifetime and unrealistic level of endowment (in terms of resources, capacities etc. available). In the past, a better approach aimed at funding institutions, thereby allowing those organisations to afford the luxury of learning, critical thinking and other original activities. An even more ideal funding mechanism would be to favour endemic (e.g. civic-driven) social movements where local capacities to self-organise are encouraged and supported over a period that may go over a project lifetime. If this was the default approach, trust would become a common currency and indeed we would have to engage in longer term partnerships, a better guarantee for stronger development results.

A final way to develop tolerance to multiple knowledges and uncertainty is to bring together various actors and to use facilitation in these workshops so as to allow all participants to reveal their personal (knowledge culture) perspective, cohabiting with each other. Facilitation becomes de facto a powerful approach to plant new ideas, verging on the idea  of ‘facipulation’ (facilitation-manipulation).

Beyond a given development intervention, a way to make its legacy live on is to plug those ideas onto networks that will keep exploring the learning capital of that intervention.

What is the value proposition of all this to donors? Cynically perhaps the innovativeness of working in those ways; much more importantly, the promise of sustainable results – better guaranteed through embedded, local work. The use of metaphors can be enlightening here, in the sense that it gives different ideas: what can you invest in projects and short term relationships? e.g. gardening for instance planting new initiatives in an existing soil/bed or putting fertilizer in existing plants…

Interesting links related to the discussion:

• Documenting change: an introduction to process documentation (a document explaining the theory and IRC’s practice around process documentation over seven years;
• Getting to social (blog post by Harold Jarche, February 2012);
• Mid-term assessment blues (blog post by Patrick Moriarty from IRC on a flexible learning-focused M&E approach in the Triple-S project.
• Results from this IKM-E discussion on the wiki;

On participation and engagement:

Sustainable, effective development interventions are informed by careful and consistent participation and engagement, recognising the value of multiple knowledges and valuing respect for different perspectives as part of a general scientific curiosity and humility as to what we know about what works and what doesn’t in development.

The second strand we explored on day 1 was participation and engagement with multiple knowledges. This boils down to the question: how to value different knowledges and particularly ‘local knowledge’, bearing in mind that local knowledge is not a synonym to Southern knowledge because we all possess some local knowledge, regardless of where we live.

A sound approach to valuing participation and engagement is to recognise the importance of creating the bigger picture in our complex social initiatives. The concept of cognitive dissonance is particularly helpful here: As communities of people we (should) value some of our practices and document them so that we create and recognise a bigger collective whole but then we have to realise that something might be missing from that collective narrative, that we might have to play the devil’s advocate to challenge our thinking – this is the ‘cognitive dissonance at play – and it is more likely to happen by bringing external views or alternative points of view, but also e.g. by using facilitation methods that put the onus on participants to adopt a different perspective (e.g. DeBono’s six-thinking hats). Development work has to include cognitive dissonance to create better conditions to combine different knowledges.

Participation and engagement is also conditioned by power play of course, but also by our comfort zones; e.g. as raised in a recent KM4Dev discussion, we are usually not keen on hiring people with different perspectives, who might challenge the current situation. We also don’t like the frictions that come about with bringing different people to the table: we don’t like to rediscuss the obvious, we don’t like to renegotiate meaning but that is exactly what is necessary for multiple knowledges to create a trustworthy space. The tension between deepening the field and expanding it laterally with new people is an important tension, in workshops as in development initiatives.

We may also have to adopt different approaches and responses in front of a multi-faceted adversity for change: Some people need to be aware of the gaps; others are aware but not willing because they don’t see the value or feel threatened by inviting multiple perspectives; others still are also aware and don’t feel threatened but need to be challenged beyond their comfort zone. Some will need ideas, others principles, others yet actions.

At any rate, inviting participation calls for inviting related accountability mechanisms. Accountability (which will come back on the menu on day 2) is not just towards donors but also towards the people we invite participation, or we run the risk of ‘tokenising’ participation (pretending that we are participatory but not changing the decision-making process). When one interviews a person, they  have to make sure that what they are transcribing faithfully reflects what the interviewee said. So with participation, participants have to be made aware that their inputs are valued and reflected in the wider engagement process, not just interpreted as ‘a tick on the participatory box’.

Participation and engagement opens up the reflective and conversation space to collective engagement, which is a very complex process as highlighted in Charles Dhewa’s model of collective sense-making in his work on traducture. A prerequisite in that collective engagement and sense-making is the self-confidence that you develop in your own knowledge. For ‘local knowledge’, this is a very difficult requirement, not least because even in their own context, proponents of local knowledge might be discriminated and rejected by others for the lack of rigor they display.

So how to invite participation and engagement?

Values and principles are guiding pointers. Respect (for oneself and others) and humility or curiosity are great lights on the complex path to collective sense-making (as illustrated by Charles Dhewa’s graph below). They guide our initiatives by preserving a learning attitude among each and every one of us. Perhaps development should grow up to be more about  ‘ignorance management’, an insatiable thirst for new knowledge. The humility about our own ignorance and curiosity might lead us to unravel ever sharper questions, on the dialectical and critical thinking path, rather than off-the-shelf (and upscaling-friendly) answers – which we tend to favour in the development sector. The importance here is thedevelopment of shared meaning.

A collective sensemaking framework (by Charles Dhewa)

As highlighted in the previous conversation, not every step of a development initiative requires multi-stakeholder participation, but a useful principle to invite participation and engagement isiteration. By revisiting at regular intervals the assumptions we have, together with various actors, we can perhaps more easily ensure that some key elements from the bigger picture are not thrown away in the process. This comes back to the idea of assessing the level of complexity we are facing, which is certainly affected by a) the amount of people that are affected by (or have a crucial stake in) the initiative at hand and b) the degree of inter-relatedness of the changes that affect them and connect them.

Iteration and multi-stakeholder engagement and participation are at the heart of the‘inception phase’ approach. This is only one model for participation and un-linear planning:

• On one end of the spectrum, a fully planned process with no room for (meaningful) engagement because the pathway traced is not up for renegotiation;
• Somewhere in the middle, a project approach using an inception period to renegotiate the objectives, reassess the context, understand the motivations of the stake-holders;
• At the other end of the spectrum, a totally emergent approach where one keeps organising new processes as they show up along the way, renegotiating with a variety of actors.

Seed money helps here for ‘safe-fail’ approaches, to try things out and draw early lessons and perhaps then properly budget for activities that expand that seed initiative. Examples from the corporate sector also give away some interesting pointers and approaches (see Mintzberg’s books and the strategy safari under ‘related resources’). The blog post by Robert Chambers on ‘whose paradigm’

“]Adaptive pluralism – a useful map to navigate complexity? [Credits: Robert Chambers

counts and his stark comparison between a positivist and adaptive pluralism perspectives are also very helpful resources to map out the issues we are facing here.

At any rate, and this can never be emphasised enough, in complex environments – as is the case in development work more often than not – a solid context analysis is in order if one is to hope for any valuable result, in the short or long run.

Related resources:

• Whose paradigm counts (blog post on Aid on the edge);
• Strategy safari - a guided tour through the wilds of strategic management;
• Henry Mintzberg’s books about management and other proofs from the corporate sector about the fact that top-down / command & control approaches do not work;
• Jerome Brumer’s two modes of thought in psychology.
• Results of this discussion on the IKM wiki

These have been our musings on day 1, perhaps not ground-breaking observations but pieces of an IKM-E collage that brings together important pointers to the legacy of IKM-Emergent. Day 2 is promising…

For IKM this is an important issue because organisational knowledge, the knowledge of organisations including companies and businesses, is one form of the multiple knowledges which need to be taken into account when resolving complex development problems.

In any event, it’s not small companies or consultancies that are meant under  private sector. Instead, it seems to me that it usually referring to the corporate sector or big business, and more specifically to multinational companies. But, if that is the case, why call it the private sector? Let’s just call it multinational companies.

If you do a google search for private sector involvement in development, there are a whole host of development organisation from the World Bank to CIDA emphasising the importance of the private sector for development, covering a broad range of roles.

But a couple of years ago at a KM4dev 2009 in Brussels, Kemly Camacho noted that it was important to remember that the relationship between multinational companies and development is not without its problems, particularly in the way big corporations often ride roughshod over local communities in areas such as their rights to local plants. Other colleagues mentioned the role of Monsanto, the multinational company with seed distribution practices which have been widely criticised, particularly with regard to seed distribution in Haiti, India and Indonesia as you can read in the Monsanto entry in Wikipedia. Now, I have to admit that this is not really my area of expertise but the evidence does look pretty overwhelming, don’t you think?

But another area where multinational companies have also been criticised is in the arena of academic publishing which has big implications for development because important development knowledge is published in these journals. Development journals are published by commercial publishers, such as Elsevier Science, who are also publishing many other academic journals. The economics of these journals is, well, curious because it includes a strange mixture of commercial profit and free-riding on the public sector. On the one hand, academic journals have had some of the highest profit levels encountered in the publishing industry over the past 30 years (Guédon 2003, p. 167). On the other hand, authors receive no financial return from the journal for their contribution, and members of Editorial Boards receive little more than a stipend for their work. Instead, they receive salaries from their academic employers. The journals are also generally publishing work financed from public funds. Subscriptions to journals are mainly bought by libraries, often of the same institutions where the authors are located. These subscription rates are high. For example, the journal World Development has an institutional print price of €2668 per annum in 2012. In his 2003 paper Locating the Information Society within civil society: the case of scientific and scholarly publications, Jean-Claude Guédon argued that since 1970s, the system of academic publishing has become increasingly elitist. It has:

…turned into a form of growing elitism that has replaced the earlier competitive quest for excellence, as this elitism is now kept in place and even intensified by financial means.

I realise that the case of Monsanto and academic publishing are very different but they do illustrate the fact that multinational companies’ manner of doing business can be harmful to local people, as in the case of Monsanto, or that they can be involved in an economic system which is not in the broader interests of development knowledge as a global public good, as is the case of the academic publishing industry.

Further examples of the multinational companies’ involvement in development are outlined in the 2009 article Ethical concerns at the bottom of the pyramid: where CSR meets BOP by Kirk Davidson, an American academic based at the Mount St. Mary’s University.

Davidson describes the growing interest in C.K. Prahalad’s concept of attacking world poverty by encouraging multinational companies to do business with the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) namely the billions of people globally who live on $2 a day or less. He enumerates the ethical problems involved and reviews two classic case studies of multinational companies marketing their products to the global poor: Nestle’s infant milk formula from the 1970s and Reynolds’s sales of the Uptown cigarette in Philadelphia, USA, in 1989. The conclusions from these cases are still applicable to multinational companies today and are important to bear in mind when considering the role of multinational companies in development:

• When doing business in developing countries, and especially when targeting the poor, multinational firms
  have an obligation to use marketing tactics appropriate to those countries and those markets.
• Marketers must please more than just their customers. There are other stakeholders who can have an effect on the
  company’s operations and who must be considered. Even though both buyer and seller may be satisfied
  with the results of a transaction – whether it be the purchase of Uptown cigarettes in Philadelphia or the
  purchase of Fair and Lovely skin-whitening cream in Mumbai – elements of the encompassing civil
  society such as the media and various advocacy groups may raise the charge of unethical behavior.
• Emotion may trump reason. The rational argument defending free choice in the marketplace gets nowhere against the picture of a major corporation targeting a vulnerable segment of the market with harmful products, such as cigarettes or infant formula.
• It is the perception of justice and fairness that is all important, the situation as understood by the surrounding society. When multinational firms target the bottom of the pyramid as a profit-making strategy, it may be perceived as exploitation by some NGOs or even by the host government.

Davidson concludes that ethical challenges are an integral part of every business endeavour, because at the core of all business activity there is the fundamental and natural tension between buyer and seller:

Regardless of country, culture, income level, market served, product or service category, high-tech or low-tech: this tension is there, raising ethical questions which must be addressed.

He argues that engaging in business with the world’s poorest consumers toward the goal of eradicating global poverty creates its own unique set of ethical problems. Especially for large, multinational firms there is always the threat that such engagement – not as charity but as a profit-making enterprise – will be perceived as exploitation and manipulation of unsophisticated, poorly educated consumers. Avoiding this requires an understanding of the role of the firm, not simply as a profit-generating organization, but as an essential part of larger society. It requires that the company be a good global citizen, fulfilling its economic, ethical and social responsibilities. In short, he argues that companies must integrate all the principles of corporate social responsibility (CSR) into their business planning for the BOP.

Traducture and Translation in International Development

Wangui wa goro shared her views on traducture. As someone rooted in literature, she has realized that literature carries African memory and values:

The history of Africa is carried in African literature. Literature, Sport and Music have given us a common sense of being African.

According to Wangui, traducture refers to the depth of knowledge required in translating and transfering knowledge from one culture to another.  These translations are not equal as there is violence and imposition of power.  For instance, very few English speakers speak African languages even if they have been in Africa for decades or centuries. Many development workers from western countries have not read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe which uniquely lays bare the relationship between Africa and the West.

Creating words through literature is critical for development and this points to the importance of traducture. Translation should be a primary activity as it can help to build excitement and fun into international development.

Mike Powell, the Director of IKM Emergent Programme spoke about his programme’s thrust on critically analysing development as knowledge production:

Development is not caused by international aid but it happens all the time in societies.  We should strive to change reality and accelerate positive processes so that development becomes part of human development not an imposition on people. Numerous development organizations do participatory work, some engaged in genuine participation while in some cases participation is window dressing. As a development organization, you should feel bad if you realize that you have spent US$10 million in a rural area like Niassa but have never spoken directly to beneficiaries because you cannot speak their language.  This issue does not receive much attention as shown by the fact that many development agencies do not have a translation budget, yet it is so critical.

Knowledge has a vital role in underpinning human action.  We can only function through our knowledge. Any possibility of development should be enhanced through regaining confidence in local knowledge.  We should be suspicious of the North – South discourse which replicates colonial communication systems in which ideas flowed from the West to Africa.  African languages like Wolof and Hausa should effectively speak to each other.

Dr Mpalive Msiska, a lecturer at Birkbeck College in UK, picked up the conversation, mentioning that knowledge and development does not take place in a vacuum.  There is a context and history which includes colonialism.  Literature offers us metaphors for thinking about these issues:

In development people invent others in their own understanding.  On the other hand, post – colonial literature gives us a metaphor of thinking about development and provides a different type of dialogue.  Traducture suggests knowledge creation as a dialogue and this is one way we can dismantle assumptions that development knowledge should be pre-packaged.

Prof Kingo Mchombu from the University of Namibia concurred, adding that we need multi-dimensional perspectives as opposed to the current situation where development is seen as a transfer of knowledge by powerful agencies such as the World Bank.  Due to the colonial narrative that knowledge moves from those who know to those who do not know, indigenous knowledge is invisible because it is from the powerless who are often willing to ignore their knowledge in order to accept gifts from foreigners.

We have to forge new relationships between the so-called North and the South in order to reduce knowledge dependency.  Solutions are often there but ignored because they come from the poor.  Communities should be empowered to think of themselves as owners of solutions and problems.  Major questions we should answer include:  How can communities see themselves as graduates of community knowledge systems at the same level with graduates from Havard University and other prestigious knowledge centres?  How do we take pride in village knowledge?

Traducture is also a major issue in developed countries such as the United Kingdom.   Professor Amanda Hopkinson, an academic in Literary Translation, told participants that, London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world as shown by research conducted in 2004 which revealed that at least 342 languages were spoken in London.  The research showed that, after English, the most spoken languages were Portuguese and Yoruba. In the face of globalisation, mother tongues now have an elevated status in many countries and traducture has an important role to play.

A world renowned translator, Ross Schwartz highlighted the significance of translation:

To unlock a culture, you have to understand its untranslatable words. Translation is seeing the world through the eyes of others. When I lived in Paris, I spoke and lived in French.  The word ‘suburb’ means different things to English and Parisian people, for example. Translation functions as a cultural bridge that brings together experiences from diverse cultures.  However, translators need training if they are to realize their full communication potential.

A multidisciplinary practitioner, Gibril Faal, shared interesting ideas regarding Africans in the diaspora. Like the Wolof of Sene-Gambia, Africans in the diaspora are gripped by the fear of loss of bearings and imminent onset of destitution.  Among the Wolof of Sene-Gambia, there is a preoccupation with  Tumuranke (fear of loss of bearings and imminent onset of destitution).

In the new millennium, loss of relatives can be a very bad experience.  In the diaspora, we have put all our contacts in mobile phones such that if you suddenly lose your phone in central London, you lose all contact and become a Tumuranke. There is a joking relationship between the Wolof in which people share truths in their relationships.  Traducture can be highly illuminating in these circumstances.  People do not migrate to countries but to communities.  Translation can help us in finding our way through the world.

Hands –on course on translation

During the colloquium, Ross Schwartz conducted an informative hands-on workshop on translation where she began by saying that translation is a constant process of negotiation between authors and readers:

Language is about music. Translators should pay attention to the tension between the meaning of the words and the music of the language. Children love this music and that is why they find it easy to learn new languages.  A translator needs to juggle between precise meaning and music.  During translation, it is critical to look at rhythm, music and deep meaning.

The role of journals and peer review

With development no longer limited to economic fundamentals but gingerly moving towards people –centred approaches, participants briefly talked about the role of journals and peer review in the context of multiple knowledges.  Sarah Cummings shared experiences on the use of psychometric tools as a citation mechanism for top international journals used by academics:

Journals are often a silo of knowledge not accessible to development.  The South is marginalized against enormous dominance by Northern Institutions.

Sarah added that while journals have a specific agenda, they should be consciousness of what is happening around them.  According to Gibril, academic journals remain distinct beasts and the old patronage in peer reviewing of journals remains very strong with tenacious gatekeepers. Another issue is that policy makers do not read reference papers and journals. Efforts to move knowledge from these knowledge repositories have seen some academics becoming activists by night to try and gain influence.

Retracing the footsteps

Towards the end, the colloquium was marked by some potent reflection. Professor Mzamane:

We all have to try and deconstruct the political neutrality of translation. The colloquium has demonstrated the importance of epistemological democracy. Every village has a text if you want to listen.  Traducture is one of the vital strategies of realization.

According to Wangui,  the definition of traducture is evolving and will soon solidify  -contributing to the transformation of development work.

At the end, it was Gibril’s privilege to thank Wangui for initiating the colloquium which brought us in contact with elders of knowledge.  He recalled words from his great grandfather who had taught him that there are four types of elders: elders of wealth, elders of power, elders of age, and elders of knowledge.  The colloquium was indeed filled with elders of knowledge.