Interview with Alan Fowler

Interview and editing by Frederique Demeijer and Marlieke Kieboom

Tags: Worldwide , Knowledge Platform
Additional tags: Alan Fowler , Civic Driven Change , Practice , Academic

Bio: Alan Fowler worked as a manager, adviser, researcher and writer. He has made specific contributions to development through his books, publications and presentations. His focus lies on the experience and perspectives of citizens, civil society and non-governmental organisations, usually in the context of international relations, aided development, democratisation and social change. Prof. dr. Alan Fowler is a past President of the International Society for Third Sector Research and was a board member of CIVICUS, the Global Alliance for Citizen Participation. He is currently an affiliate professor at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Website:www.alanfowler.org

How do you think knowledge triggers change?

 

“It is important to first unpack ‘knowledge’ and ‘change’. What is knowledge, and whose knowledge is it? For me, knowledge is embodied information upon which people can act or not as the case may be. When talking about knowledge, I prefer using the plural form ‘knowledges’. This is because knowledge comes from different sources, it has different ‘owners’ and displays different types, such as overt and tacit knowledge. We also need to unpack the term ‘change’, particuarly in terms of the time frame involved. In our work on Civic Driven Change (CDC) my colleague Kees Biekart and I make a distinction between changes that are immediate, or are tied to political, institutional or inter-generational scales of time. Being explicit about time horizons in relation to knowledge for change is important.

 

Does knowledge trigger change? I believe it’s a questionable starting proposition. When knowledges are ‘packaged’, they are often treated as commodity which can be applied to change. But knowledge can also be used selectively by powerholders to maintain the status quo, that is to prevent change. But, you could argue – and this is sort of a counterfactual – that the fact that nothing has changed is also a change. If you use knowledge to stop change in a dynamic environment you’re affecting change by trying to stick where you are. In other words, knowledge always influences change but not necessarily in the way intended. It’s a paradoxical and uncertain relationship.

 

In development cooperation, I think insufficient attention is paid to different types of knowledges and knowledge holders. Assumptions about the relationship beween knowledges and development would become more valid if we would better acknowledge who has them, how they generate, how they are valued, how they are validated, how they seem to be true or not.

 

Those with greater power consider their knowledge to be more valid or ‘universal’ than others. This problem plays out in the aid system because of built in asymmetries of power which privileges the knowledge of givers over that of receivers. As in many other areas, the aid system defines the ‘knowledge problem’ in terms of the solution that it can offer. In this case, the solution is ‘management’ of knowledge that can be written down. Interactive generation, co-production as an important empowerment method and context-based endogenous knowledges are simply marginalised. Knowledge that is lived and cannot be ‘de-centrally’ stored or managed takes second place in aided change.”

 

How do you think the gap between researchers and practitioners can be bridged, if at all?

 

“The basic academic stance is to be skeptical; while the stance of NGOs and by and large of practitioners is, in the first instance, to be encouraging, engaging and supportive. Practitioners tend not to be skeptical because it makes you appear you’re not helping people.

 

But these stances or pre-dispositions can be held together. If you actively put energy into nurturing the relationship between skepticism and appreciation the tension can help you move forward. For example, you need to be totally engaged in development work, totally committed to it. But if you want to be useful you also need to be detached at the same time.

 

So, how do you hold together commitment and detachment? One way is by standing back from your passion and your engagement, being honest about who you are and continually curious about what you are doing. Then ambiguity becomes productive. If we as NGO workers and aid researchers cannot criticise ourselves, we are in a much more vulnerable position when others criticising us from outside. Then we can only be reactive, defensive; and that is not a productive way to approach the problem of bridging across professions.

 

Personally I’m not the ‘publish or perish’ academic, nor am I a ‘with-my-feet-in-the-mud’ practitioner. I try and hold these together. But it means living with the fact that you are always going to be less than optimal in one of these two peer groups. If you are in an operational NGO really trying to develop the intellectual side of the organisation, you will probably find yourself on the edge of what is possible. If you are in an academic institution – like ISS – really trying to work with practitioners, you are blamed for not being rigorous and publishing enough. People who are trying to be both are the ‘boundary spanners’ dealing with two different performance measures. But by trying to be both they may only ever score a 6 out of 10 in both professions. But if you can score two 6s, that’s actually 12, which, for me, is better than being a pure academic scoring a 10. I’m sort of comfortable enough with the two 6s, but I cannot be comfortable with two 5s.”

 

How do you think research – in your case, civic driven change research – could eventually mean something for practice?

 

“To some extent the question is already being answered spontaneously across the world. People are picking up the concept for themselves and operationalise it in whatever way they think is appropriate for where they are. CDC tries to desectoralise, to ‘unlabel’ citizens as development actors from convenient boxes: ‘you’re from the civil society sector’, ‘you’re with the government’. CDC helps to break out of that old frame and trap in thinking. We have to try and get people to appreciate once more that they are political actors, whatever walk of life they’re in. A challenge of CDC is undo some of the labeling and produce new language may help people to reconsider what they are doing already, in ways which are more meaningful for their lives as citizens. That’s how research can be meaningful for practice. It is an attempt to facilitate new ways of thinking.”