Whose Knowledge Counts?
I once attended a school where speaking my mother tongue was discouraged.
In the society I grew up in, fluency in English was a language of intelligence. It earned mea badge of honour. Speaking with a local accent could earn a raised eyebrow, a laugh, or, at worst, the assumption that you were not educated enough.
At the time, I did not think much about it. Many of us simply accepted it as normal.
Years later, while studying community development in my Master’s degree, I returned to a question I became aware of months prior:
Whose knowledge counts?
It sounds like an academic question, but it is one that impacts everyday life.
When governments design policies without consulting the people affected by them, whose knowledge counts?
When researchers arrive in communities to collect data and leave without involving local people in interpreting or owning the findings, whose knowledge counts?
When children are taught that intelligence sounds like a foreign language while their native language is pushed to the margins, whose knowledge counts?
The more I reflect on development practice, the more convinced I become that many well-intentioned interventions fail because they begin with the assumption that expertise exists somewhere else.
Yet communities often possess deep knowledge of their own realities.
Indigenous knowledge is not simply folklore or tradition. It is understanding developed through generations of lived experience. It is knowledge shaped by people’s relationship with their environment, culture, history, and way of life. For example, studies have shown that traditional communities possess extensive environmental knowledge and play significant roles in protecting biodiversity.
This is why community development cannot merely be about delivering solutions. It must also be about recognising knowledge.
One of the concepts I have encountered in my studies is epistemic justice. Put simply, it is the right of people to know what they know and to have their ways of knowing respected. It includes the right to generate, protect, and value knowledge that emerges from their own experiences.
The idea resonates with me because it extends beyond Indigenous communities.
Think about education.
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A curriculum can be technically sound and still fail if it ignores the realities of the people expected to implement it. Teachers, students, parents, and communities possess knowledge about their specific contexts that policymakers often overlook. When reforms are introduced without meaningful participation from these groups, they risk becoming exercises in administration rather than transformation.
The same principle applies to research.
As researchers, we sometimes speak about "going to the field" as though knowledge is an object waiting to be collected. However, communities are not laboratories, and people are not data points.
The most meaningful research often emerges when people are treated not as subjects but as partners.
This is what co-production of knowledge is about.
It is the recognition that knowledge should not flow in only one direction. Researchers may bring theories and methods. But communities bring lived experience, context, history, and insight. When these forms of knowledge meet respectfully, the result is often weightier than either could produce alone.
Maybe this is why I find myself increasingly drawn to questions of ownership.
Who owns the knowledge produced about a community?
Who benefits from it?
Who gets credited for it?
And who gets left out?
These questions matter because development is not simply about resources but about dignity.
When people are denied ownership of their stories, cultures, languages, and knowledge systems, they have lost something important.
Preserving indigenous cultures, therefore, is not merely an act of nostalgia. It is an act of recognising identity. It is a way of affirming that people have the right to understand themselves, define themselves, and contribute to influencing the systems that affect their lives.
As I continue learning about research and community development, I came across Abasiama Akpan’s research on identity development and four questions from her work have become paramount to me:
- Who was this system originally designed for?
- Who is assumed to hold knowledge and authority?
- Who owns the outcomes of the system?
- Whose realities were absent during the design process?
These questions apply to education. They apply to development. They apply to research. They apply to our relationships.
And they all point us back to the same question:
Whose knowledge counts?
