Knowledge for Development?: Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid Review

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Knowledge for Development: Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid ReviewThose dealing with knowledge management in donor agencies should read this book and keep it on their bookshelves. Many others in donor agencies, their government oversight bodies, and their client organizations will find it interesting. The book covers the bilateral donor agencies of the UK, Sweden and Japan, and the World Bank. It assesses the discussions of knowledge in selected policy documents of those agencies, their efforts to improve internal knowledge, their evaluation practices, their ICT-based knowledge management systems, etc. I have been involved in some of the efforts the describe, and their selection seems reasonable. The coverage is primarily focused on the 1990's, and the late 1990's were a time of rapid change in their knowledge systems. King and McGrath have read a great deal, and have interviewed a very large number of people within the agencies they study. Their work has both the advantages and disadvantages of their being academics outside of the organizations they study. They note differences among the bilateral donor agencies, marking the contingency of knowledge processes: thus Japanese aid is influenced by its experience as a recipient of foreign aid as well as a long-time donor, and by the concept of wakon yosai (Japanese spirit, Western technology) which helped guide technology transfer in Japan since the Meiji period; Sweden has maintained more interest in higher education and in science and technology than other donors. They conclude that "the knowledge revolution in agencies remains largely a series of uncoordinated projects that are being implemented without any real overall vision or strategy." (As perhaps it should be.) They do not answer the critical question as to whether the costs of the efforts to improve knowledge systems in development assistance have been justified by improvement of the efficiency or effectiveness of such assistance, but I suspect that question is unanswerable. King and McGrath do illuminate what has been happening, summarizing a great deal of information, and I found the book stimulating. [...]Knowledge for Development: Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid OverviewIn 1996, the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, declared that his organization would henceforth be "the knowledge bank." This statement marks the beginning in earnest of a new discourse of knowledge-based aid, which has spread rapidly across the development field. This book is the first detailed attempt to analyze this new discourse and practice.Through an examination of four agencies--the World Bank, the British Department for International Development, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency--the book explores what this new approach to aid means in both theory and practice. It argues that too much of the emphasis of knowledge-based aid has been on developing capacity within agencies rather than addressing the expressed needs of Southern "partners."Moreover, it questions whether knowledge-based aid leads to greater agency certainty about what constitutes good development.

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