Development cooperation is a knowledge industry

A column by Paul Hoebink

Tags: Worldwide, Knowledge Platform
Additional tags: Development cooperation, Knowledge

Development cooperation is a knowledge industry. If I state that or write that down, it always looks if that is something very obvious, something that even the blind can see. Still I arrive from time to time in places where that is severely underestimated, where un-experienced and not-knowledgeable seems to be the internal rule to appoint people at places, more than the opposite. Or places where this statement is acknowledged and subscribed, but where it is assumed that knowledge is automatically refueled, that knowledge doesn’t need maintenance. To stay in the same aphorism: knowledge is, in my opinion as well the fuel as the glue of the development cooperation business. To plan, to build, to develop, to capacitate, all these activities are in ultimate need of specific knowledge on local and global, political, economic and social processes, on relations between people, between organizations, between institutions.

Again, that being said I often observe that knowledge is considered to be something technocratic, value-free; something that one just can pick from one of the shelves in the knowledge supermarket. That also of course, is not true. Knowledge in general is value-loaded, full of judgments, prejudice, even clichés.
This just struck my mind reading and listening again to the recent debate in the Netherlands on the future of development cooperation, in particular on Dutch development assistance. For those not living in the Netherlands or not being able to read Dutch: the conservative swing in the Netherlands has created a climate in which everything that is being considered coming from the ‘left’ or from ‘progressive’ sources, is judged as being ‘soft’, non-effective and useless. Secondly, those now pushed in the defensive seem constantly to have difficulties to show what they stand for and why it is worth to defend it. If they do defend, they are accused of defending their own intrerests. This is happening also to Dutch development cooperation at the moment. It is, in a certain way, an odd debate, because it doesn’t seem to be debated with the same intensity in other European countries

It is interesting to see, how ‘knowledge’ is used in this debate, because argumentation needs arguments and arguments are better off when they are based on - hopefully convincing - knowledge. The first thing that then can be observed is that a lot of the knowledge that is provided is value-loaded. The concept of development itself of course carries the values of modernization, of copying the West. Value-loaded knowledge is however in particular present in assumptions and argumentation on how development is and was organized. The main evening newspaper NRC Handelsblad stated: ‘Economic freedom and growth are anyway much more powerful factors in the reduction of poverty than aid’. Aid activists will in general agree with the second part of the statement, because aid cannot do more than complement the activities of citizens, enterprises and governments in developing countries. But the value is of course in the first part. Since East-Asia is generally in these debates proposed as an example to Sub-Sahara Africa, I always ask ‘where do you see economic freedom there?’ Where in our history has there ever been a free market? I know, many economists are believers, they believe in the free market. That it ever existed is contested knowledge.

The second observation that can be made, is that knowledge not necessarily has to be accurate or even might be false. Conservative MP Arend-Jan Boekestijn, one of the promoters of the debate and sometimes a sharp observer, quoted an interview totally wrong by stating that development assistance to Africa was only one per cent of total financial resources (including direct investment, export incomes, remittances etc.) going to the continent. Of course he is suggesting that when it is so little, you can easily terminate it. Without problem it could be demonstrated that he is wrong and that it is ten per cent, but the point is that in the interview he quotes the statement was that it was one per cent for all developing countries.

Could this be a case of deliberate misinformation, sometimes sheer ignorance leads to the presentation false ‘knowledge’. In the same editorial NRC Handelsblad suggested that the major Africa-policy evaluation that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published last year presented a reason to look carefully at the expenditures on foreign aid. It is suggested regularly that this evaluation comes with evidence that aid-effectiveness in Africa is doubtful. But that is not at all the case, certain policies of the Ministry and the Ministry of Finance are severely criticized in some parts of the report, but the chapters that deal with aid effectiveness, e.g. in education, show great progress or indicate, e.g. in general budget support, that it rather difficult at the moment to come with valid judgments.

A pop-song of Pat Benatar cried quite some time ago that love is a battlefield. An analysis of knowledge production and presentation in the development-industry will most probably show that through its sixty years history also many battles were fought here. I am not a pessimist at all, but I predict that this will stay the same for the next sixty years. What is then left to us, is just to go on, to hammer an tailor and to continuously and finally add to the body of un-contested knowledge.

Paul Hoebink holds a special professorial chair in Development Cooperation, instituted by HIVOS and Oxfam Novib, at the Centre for International Development (CIDIN) at the Radboud University Nijmegen.