Message-ID: <19981106230011.AAC5746@LOCALNAME> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:01:43 -0400 From: Kerry Miller <mailto:kerryo@NS.SYMPATICO.CA> Subject: OneWorld on the WDR To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
http://www.oneworld.org/guides/wb2.htmlFrom moneybags to know-it-all. The World Bank shifts its stall
7th October 1998 By Robin Mansell and Andrew Barnett*
"Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere... Poor countries differ from rich not only because they have less capital but because they have less knowledge". With these welcome and uplifting words the World Bank today launches the latest of its annual keynote addresses to development stakeholders, the World Development Report.
[...] Knowledge can indeed be like light, but it can also take on costumes of darkness. Motorways may open new farm markets but can also blight rural environments. New crops can raise agricultural productivity but can also drive out-of-work labour into city slums. The gain from new knowledge is matched by new risks of adverse consequences and worries that technology may not be able to deliver its promises. Here is a home truth that previous, more hard- hitting WDRs might have relished.
Yet the Bank appears to shy away even from drawing basic distinctions between knowledge and information, even to the point of dropping the word information from the working title of earlier drafts. It is not until near the end that the authors venture the oblique saw that 'information becomes knowledge as it is interpreted and made concrete in light of the individual's understanding of the context'.
Most information is produced in wealthy countries. Trying to shift it across into a context of poverty very commonly creates absurd mismatches. Much recent research has looked into how people operate within national and local contexts to combine external information with their local experience and resources to produce innovations. Such communities of interest and habit formed the focus of a series of studies sponsored by the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, published earlier this year by OUP as Knowledge Societies.
The baseline premise of the report in hand, however, is that breaking down information barriers and pushing through progressive regulation to guarantee access to all, for all, will give voice to the unheard and empower society's poor and excluded. Dream on. Power relations between those who hold the purse strings and those who do not will still govern how and why the new knowledge is distributed.
A World Bank is probably one of the few organisations powerful enough to redress the balance between the knowledge 'haves' and the 'have nots'. Patterns of disadvantage and marginalisation are sure to change in the future, but it is far from certain that inequalities will vanish through investment in better IT or knowledge.
The WDR echoes the current expectation among 'market leaders' that the path developing countries must follow is one of convergence, replicating what they define as the frontier. But recent experience shows that greater potential lies in using new and advanced informatics to create entirely new pathways towards progress or find new solutions to problems and dilemmas that have held development back for years. Learning processes are dynamic, uncertain, full of surprises. Following leaders is not the only, nor necessarily the best, way to thrive.
[...]
The World Development Report 1998/1999. Knowledge for Development is published for the World Bank by Oxford University Press and is available [in PDF format] on the Internet at www.worldbank.org/wdr/.
*Note to Editors: Robin Mansell is Professor of Information and Communication Technology at SPRU, University of Sussex and editor of the report for the United nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development Knowledge Societies: Information Technology for Sustainable Development, Oxford University Press, 1998. Andrew Barnett is free-lance economist and an Honorary Fellow at SPRU.