The world wide web offers a growing variety of expertise on all kinds of topics. This global knowledge, such as the scientific domain, has generic character. The expertise is important, especially to tackle all sorts of challenges, but without including the local context could be quickly useless. Often, the applied knowledge lacks an interdisciplinary approach and disregards local and indigenous knowledge.
The German professor Dietrich Dörner describes it accurately in his book the “The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations.” Problems are seen logic to tackle, but are, in contrary, far more complex than firstly thought.
Faced with problems that exceed our grasp, we pile small error upon small error to arrive at spectacularly wrong conclusions. We too often ignore the big picture and seek refuge in what we know how to do – fiddling while Rome burns. (Book review)
In a simulation for a development project, Dörner proves how this can lead to failure, and in many cases, efforts have no sustainable impact. One key challenge is to solely rely on global knowledge and state of the art expertise and disregard the local knowledge.
Local knowledge is a collection of facts and relates to the entire system of concepts, beliefs and perceptions that people hold about the world around them. This includes the way people observe and measure their surroundings, how they solve problems and validate new information. It includes the processes whereby knowledge is generated, stored, applied and transmitted to others. (Source: FAO)
Indigenous knowledge are traditions and practices of certain regional, indigenous, or local communities. The growing importance of indigenous knowledge and technologies can be seen, for example, for biodiversity conservation.
Therefore, efforts towards knowledge sharing are a key to make projects work. Kingo Mchombu, author of the Sharing Knowledge Handbook has an interesting point in that regard:
credit: angela7dreams
In most cases, the information needs of the urban and rural poor are seldom taken into account when they are supplied with information to solve their problem of poverty. The assumption being that they know very little and that is why they are poor, thus the knowledge system of the urban and rural poor is totally ignored when supplying them with external information.
It is puzzling to see how often a well intended transfer of knowledge is seen as the right way. As Joseph Stiglitz suggested, most learning initiatives in the development sector have tried to scan globally and apply locally. Also Ben Ramalingam argues: “This ‘pipeline’ approach to learning seriously underestimates the complexity of aid work.”
To my understanding, there is a growing need to link the local with the global in development work. Sharing and mixing knowledge is as important as relying on an interdisciplinary approach. To have people and organizations going this path and linking theses spaces are becoming even more important in the future. My hope is that the social web provides a framework for this broad knowledge sharing and collaboration, but this I will describe in my next post.
Related posts:
- From global to local: Mobile, mapping and action Location, mobile phones and the Internet, combined together, are...
- Information silos vs. open data in development organizations Accurate data is key for development work. Opening data...
- Exploring the potentials of blogging for development In the recent edition of the “Participatory Learning and...
- What does local content have to do with low-bandwidth applications? High bandwidth access expands worldwide, finally in Africa too,...
This blog explores worldwide social innovations and how people benefit from infor- mation and communication technologies. 
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
blogged about an important topic for me: Complexity trap: Local vs. global knowledge in development work http://tinyurl.com/5e5259
You’re spot on – too often people trying to do good think that they can drop a foreign solution in and expect everything to work as it would in London or New York.
Without a grounded understanding of the local environment, it’s culture, history and traditions most well intentioned work is wasted…
(tragically, your random anti-spam captcha is “export”)
I think this is why micro-finance is so successful. It’s based on the assumption that poor people are trustworthy, and in fact do know how to improve their situation when they’re extended some trust (i.e. given a bit of money).
What’s more, I think the most important thing (the right mindset) has not much to do with knowledge. It’s very tacit. Every person can be a problem solver. Of course, those persons may choose to learn about best practices elsewhere, be it in communities near them or in whole different countries. Often, solutions are so context-dependent that you must be really sure the approach you’re copying is indeed applicable to your own situation. Sometimes, it may turn out to be faster to solve the problem by yourself. The basic idea of roads, public transportation, health care or education are not that hard to grasp…
I think Grameen has very good DNA in that sense. Do you know more big organizations that share such a community-oriented / bottom-up approach?
I’m currently developing a global network for social entrepreneurs with the basic aim to bring people together in real life wherever they are to work together and learn from each others expertise. We are specifically seeking to avoid the organisational stereotypes of classic formal learning, e.g. “a learning institution like a university has to be XYZ”. That said, I would consider the breaking down of such stereotypical barriers (who is competent/who is not; where learning should occur/should not etc.) a crucial step to opening up repositories of expertise etc. that could be supported significantly by social networks – but not virtual networks alone. It’s not only about the learning – it’s also about the work. So, sites like “neighbour” are going in the right direction to open up local/localised knowledge but that won’t be enough.
Late to the party, but want to pipe up to say this is a great post.
Hi Christian,
For a long time in Britain, the best place to share and gain knowledge was in your ‘local’ (pub)! Not sure how this is in Eschborn?
I think the newer social media have a huge potential to strengthen the local basis and focus of much development work, by creating and sustaining demands, maybe even small ones, for information expertise and knowledge that is local, for local purposes, by local people.
I did some work a few years ago at IICD on ‘local content’ on the Internet … we concluded that one of the urgent challenges is to ensure that this content, that is the expression of a local community (not what is sent to them), is properly valued. If it isn’t valued, it dies. Ironically, the local people themselves often need to persuaded to much more value this knowledge; they are often educated and trained to value external ‘global’ knowledge above that of their neighbours.
I still come across many many information and communication efforts in development that are based around the notion that they – the poor farmers or whoever – ‘need to know’ whatever it is that is being promoted … Hardly anyone invests in ways to ensure that they themselves are able to know what the farmers know.
cheers
Peter