Whose knowledge matters?
When I look at job boards these days for U.S.-based positions in the development sector, increasingly I’m seeing qualification lists say something like, “Bachelor’s/Master’s degree required or equivalent years of experience”. It seems as though employers are recognising that a Western-style formal education isn’t the only way to demonstrate skills, knowledge, and ability to perform a certain job.
And yet, there is a long history in the development sector of undervaluing local knowledge and experience compared to the education and training brought to communities from outside, when that local knowledge isn’t acquired through the same type of schooling.
[Note: in this post, when I say “local knowledge” I am talking specifically about information and understanding that can’t be learned from outside a community. I do not mean to say that communities do not or cannot have knowledge gained through Western-style education systems and training. What I want to discuss is the value placed on knowledge gained from formal Western education by external actors compared to the value placed on knowledge learned and lived from within a place and community.]
I have also been a participant in this lopsided valuation.
I have spent much more time studying at university than any reasonable person ever should, and some of my degrees have opened doors that perhaps I didn’t deserve to have opened. For nearly 12 years, I’ve earned a living through the knowledge economy, in private sector consulting and academia. These sectors are perhaps the epitome of affording significant economic value to contextual knowledge.
And herein lies a huge cognitive dissonance in development: we simultaneously value contextual knowledge learned from outside — which may or may not be applicable to a given situation — while discounting contextual knowledge and lived experience within communities, even though that knowledge could be the key to long-lasting success of development efforts.
This discounting is a criticism that I keep hearing about localisation efforts. To give one example, in a webinar focused on localisation efforts at USAID, panelists talked about how international NGOs (INGOs) and donors do not truly value the skills, resources and capabilities that already exist within a place. “Listening to local knowledge” sometimes seems tokenistic, like an attempt to include community participation in a project without really letting local expertise play an equal role in project design and decision making.
One reason for this problem may be that local knowledge doesn’t always look like knowledge as defined by traditional Western-centric education. As the Climate and Development Knowledge Network describes:
Knowledge holders and types…could include western scientific knowledge generally provided by academic researchers, but also experiential, applied knowledge normally held by practitioners, technical officers or those working in the field. Furthermore, traditional, often tacit knowledge that is owned by Indigenous communities or other local stakeholders is critical for sustainable and equitable action on the ground.
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Knowledge can also be defined as the way in which a person interprets the world based on their perspective and experience, the way a person understands their position within their environment, and a way of viewing the world.
There is a long colonial history of ignoring, discrediting, suppressing, and/or actively trying to destroy local knowledge of different types. It’s a pretty clear step from colonial knowledge values to current views on outside expertise. If we as a sector are sincere about efforts to “localise” in an authentic manner, we can’t escape the need to decolonise how we perceive and value knowledge.
(A side note: although localisation and decolonisation are commonly used to denote separate issues, they are really intertwined. As a panelist said last week during a webinar about international NGOs putting their money where their mouth is on localisation, localisation is based on recognising that the existing development system needs to be decolonised.)
Of course, being intentional about making local knowledge a core part of any program takes more work than applying the same external knowledge to different situations. But as much as we might want a methodology or approach to be scalable and replicable, “Context is everything and is wildly variable, which means there is no recipe for [community-led development]”. This statement was echoed in a recent conversation about Chief of Party roles, in which participants noted that context always matters, so project plans and implementation are never the same in two places.
When context matters, surely local, contextual knowledge and expertise has to be just as valuable as any that a university degree might confer or outside perspective might bring.
This is not to say that outsider expertise doesn’t count. Of course it does, and local organisations aren’t asking to be the only sources of knowledge. But we can interact with and value local knowledge in a different way than we have been over the last many decades.
One other suggestion for how international organisations can work with knowledge comes from Peace Direct’s report, “The Nine Roles that Intermediaries Can Plan in International Cooperation”. Intermediaries could play useful roles in brokering knowledge exchange, between local actors in the Global South and actors in the Global North, as well as across different locations within the Global South. Instead of being gatekeepers of knowledge, intermediaries could also be more intentional about sharing and co-creating knowledge through the work they support.
(The caveat, naturally, is to be thoughtful about the ways in which knowledge is produced. Too much has been written about decolonising research methodologies for me to reference here.)
As someone who has spent many years acquiring knowledge through traditional Western education systems, this subject hits close to home. It’s far too easy to have an ego built on university degrees (says anyone who has ever experienced academia in any form). But egos don’t help create a more equitable, just, healthy world. And isn’t that what we’re working for?
For more reading on knowledge in development, check out the Knowledge Management for Development Journal.
