From Communities of Practice to Communities of Resistance: Civil society and cognitive justice
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Dialogue
From Communities of Practice to Communities of Resistance: Civil society and cognitive justice
MAJA VAN DER VELDEN
ABSTRACT Maja van der Velden looks at how knowledge and power are played out in development literature and practice examining the role of knowledge, public goods and the new information communications technology (ICT) in managing and sharing knowledge. She discusses the World Bank’s knowledge-fordevelopment paradigm arguing that the paradigm of knowledge management on which it is based will lead to a grave loss of knowledge. She concludes that civil society can further its social justice and developments objectives by protecting knowers and their physical and cultural environments and by facilitating the dialogues of different knowledge. KEYWORDS knowledge; civil society; cognitive justice; global public goods; World Bank; ICTs
The problem of knowledge ^ the manner in which it is embedded in systems of thought that have monopolized our capacity to comprehend the world, narrowed our options of resistance, assaulted the dignity of particular histories and cultures, demeaned the faculties of the imagination, and compromised the futures of people around the world ^ will haunt us in the twenty-first century (Lal, 2002).
Introduction English is not my first language.When I first heard the phrase ‘knowledge management for development’, I wondered how it would translate into other languages. I immediately stumbled on one of the problems related to the concept: other languages have a variety of terms that are conflated to just one term in‘knowledge’ in English. The act of translation, it seemed, reduced the array of ways of thinking about human understanding to a narrow, possibly simplistic, formula. This impression was reinforced by literature survey of knowledge management in the development sector (van der Velden, 2002a, 2002b; King and McGrath, 2003). In a critical examination of knowledge management,Wilson, (2002) concludes that knowledge management is about the management of information and work practices. Wilson’s argument points to the intuitive assumption that knowledge is what an individual knows.When we express our knowledge, our messages contain information. That information can become another individual’s knowledge through a process of interpretation, Development (2004) 47(1), 73–81. doi:10.1057/palgrave.dev.1100004
Development 47(1): Dialogue comprehension and learning in an individual’s mind. This implies that what we know cannot be managed, but that we can try to manage the vast amounts of information available to us. Most development literature on knowledge uses the terms knowledge and information interchangeably. Instead we look here at how knowledge is understood as relative, representing the powers and interests of a certain group. Knowledge is expressed in the act of knowing and thus involves a knower. By contrast, most development literature treats knowledge as an object that can be expressed and represented independently from the knower. This knowledge is undone from its con
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