Big Change in Epistemology for Little Practical Improvement

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to the way of doing things without really addressing the power dynamics. He took the example of replacing foreign experts nowadays with nationals who are only operating in a pre-existing framework created by donors.

Instead, the development industry needs to start giving away their power to local systems through capacity building processes that enhance clear national legitimacy. Indeed,

“emphasizing “systemic capacity building” would improve the diagnosis of sectoral shortcomings in specific locations, improve project/program design and monitoring, and lead to more effective use of resources” (Potter, C., & Brough, R., 2004, p: 1). This is why authors, such as Ramalingam (2013), have been recently proposing a new shift of paradigm in which:

“donors do not rigidly adhere to pre-determined blueprints, but instead engage in experimental innovation, implement projects that work in partnership with local systems, and adapt on the fly to changing conditions” (Pedrosa-Garcia, 2017, p: 3).

I.3.2 Big Change in Epistemology for Little Practical Improvement

Wilson (2007) reviewed the context that prompted the different changes of discourse about technical assistance over the year. The concept has indeed evolved with significant epistemological improvement from technical assistance, through technical cooperation to more novel ideas related to knowledge-based aid such as knowledge management, or innovation systems.The author argues that these epistemological changes are because it is becoming more evident in the development debate that the approaches for developing countries to “learn from”

developed countries have had their limits. There is a growing need for development assistance to be guided by strong local roots through which international aid agencies can learn to “learn with” the people they are serving.

To support his argument, he notably laid out the three fundamental issues with the concept of technical cooperation in the first place. First, it’s rooted in an unbalanced power dynamic where foreign experts were often mistrusted in their missions by the local people because of the fear of foreign domination and neo-colonialism at that time. Secondly, this lack of trust between the stakeholders was surely not without basis since he pointed out that technical assistance was indeed designed in a top-down approach where knowledge was supposed to be transferred from the technologically rich countries to the backward developing countries. He furthermore argues that technical assistance faced incoherence regarding the timeline within which results should be expected. Knowledge is not a “thing” that can be quickly sold, given, or even transferred like a commodity. It has instead tacit properties that are context-specific. It requires patience

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and trust between “experts” and “users” to be created, managed, shared and finally assimilated for its use in improving people lives (Roux et al., 2006)

Governments and international organizations have been seduced by such discourse. Aid agencies are currently claiming that their development expertise and advisory services are more important than their funds (Samoff & Stromquist, 2001). For example, the World Bank’s decided in 1996 to become a “Knowledge Bank,” “making explicit the evolution of its role over the past few years into an institution that provides both expert advice and loans, in that order of importance” (Torres, 2001). However, as King & McGrath (2004) argue, this tendency of overstressing knowledge in development generated more concerns that western international development institutions continue to identify themselves as having superior technical expertise.

For some critics, “knowledge-based aid” is just a change in epistemology from “Technical Cooperation” but not in practice. “Knowing and transferring knowledge to developing countries under the form of technical assistance has been the raison d’être of Agencies” (Torres, 2001, p:

3). As we saw before, aid agencies such as the World Bank were accused of understanding development as a mere technical process where the best of knowledge is converted into the best policies, while the evidence points to the power dynamics and interests in policymaking.

The critics were also concerned that knowledge-based aid created as a response to the knowledge economy was more beneficial in investing in programs addressing the managerial needs of these international institutions rather than the needs of the people they serve (Wilson, 2007). Consequently, knowledge transfer initiatives have been disappointing in developing countries, especially in the sphere of expert advice for policymaking. Hüsken (2010) empathize with the situation of development experts in these terms: “They are thrown into a stormy sea of cultural norms and identity constructions in flux, dynamical societies and even more so into polycentric currents of social, political and economic interests and power relations. Thus, they become actors in a dynamic and controversial process we call development” (p:1).

William Easterly took a more vigorous swing at expert advice to developing countries in two major books. In the “White Man’s Burden”, the essential of his argument relies on the distinctions he made between “Planners” and “Searchers”. Planners refer to international experts of the developed world that pretend to know the answers to poverty. Searchers are the ones looking for what is demanded by the ones in need. Searchers, through trial errors, experimentation, and accountability, can build homegrown solutions.

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Unfortunately, Foreign aid has been dominated by the planners inspired by big utopian ideas to solve developing countries’ big problems such as the MDGs (Today SDGs). The plans to end world poverty and the related failures show all the pretensions of utopians’ social engineering of development. The White man’s burden describes this paternalistic thinking through which westerners felt the obligation to solve extreme poverty. As the development industry is full of actors with various interests, big plans create a collective action problem where no one is being held accountable for their failures. For Easterly, “the great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, technologies from the West when it suits the Rest to do so” (Easterly, 2007, p.363). Only the combination of choices free from external pressures can build support for aid initiatives through which what works can be expanded, piecemeal homegrown solutions are constantly experimented and verified, and aid agencies held accountable for their mistakes.

In the second book, “Tyranny of experts”, Easterly deepens his criticism by even arguing that knowledge production through spontaneous innovation with local roots is a risk that can put international experts and their development agencies out of business. Therefore, international experts pretending to know better have instead proposed to build capacity from scratch with technical advice and realized that this strategy is more feasible in autocratic countries. Indeed, by touting a couple of success stories, the development industry was able to create a psychological bias that tends to make us attribute all the credits to a “Personality Leader”.

Sound economic changes happen while we forgot the groups (The citizens in the case of a country) who were vehemently asking for them in the first place.

In the case of successful “strong men” leadership such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda, most growth miracles happen because these leaders were often forced by THE PEOPLE to surrender parts of their powers to at least provide economic freedom for entrepreneurship and innovation to thrive. It’s usually not because of “comprehensive government planning” designed by amazing minds of international experts and technocrats led by dictators like Kagame that creates these growth miracles, as it is usually advertised by development agencies such as the World Bank.

Unfortunately, most of the time, this kind of promotion for “strong men” leadership such as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, gives green light for brutal dictators to further oppress their people.

The success stories of “Strong Men Leadership” are few. For every Lee Kuan Yew, you also have 3 Mugabes of Zimbabwe.

Koch and Weingart (2016) largely echoed these arguments in what they called the “Delusion

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assistance inefficiencies as mere flaws of implementation but linked it “to the structural complexities of knowledge transfer in young democracies” (p:2). By studying the case of Tanzania and South Africa, they found that young democracies usually lose control of their political agenda in favor of international experts. It is often because of the tenuous legitimacy of the governments in these countries, their weak institutions, and, most importantly, their fragile local knowledge base.

Indeed, the politics of aid make expert advice volatile, conditional, driven by shifting fads, legitimation, and accountability pressures of the “good use” of donors’ taxpayers’ money. This forced donors to create an unequal relationship with recipients’ countries that reinforced hierarchies de-evaluating local knowledge and expertise. “For young democracies, using the knowledge capacity of their own societies seems indispensable if they want to fund and realize their own policy visions” (ibid, p:346). For these authors, Higher Education has important roles to play in this process of creating critical masses of local experts through knowledge and innovation systems in the chosen productive sectors of these countries.