Introduction -- Knowledge for development as an exercise in power -- The knowledge brokering business : NGOs and feminisms in development -- Anatomy of a knowledge broker -- "The language is difficult" : interrogating progressive information production processes -- "Very clearly there is no strategy" : interrogating progressive information dissemination practices -- "If you want to start a new project, then you pray that funders are on the same wavelength!" : interrogating southern-based knowledge intermediaries and systems -- Conclusion
ABSTRACTThis article argues that measures designed to improve the availability and accessibility of information as a key strategy to facilitate development have become ends in themselves, de‐linked from their potential to have an impact on Southern knowledge systems that may lead to improved development outcomes. The production and dissemination of ever‐greater volumes of information in response to concerns about the uneven availability of information, particularly for individuals and intermediaries based in the global South, are unable to address the persistent problem of the fragmentation of knowledge systems that result from knowledge for development (K4D) initiatives in which information and knowledge are treated as isolated entities. The article presents the findings of a study into the K4D practices of a network of women/gender information intermediaries. It reveals that attempts to strengthen Southern knowledge systems are forestalled by efforts that merely improve the supply of information rather than engaging with knowledge processes in their entirety, thus limiting their potential to promote improved development outcomes. Proxy measures of success are used that fail to challenge the typically neoliberal underpinnings of the dominant knowledge infrastructure. The author concludes that, if knowledge‐based development interventions are to be made more effective, K4D stakeholders need to find ways to engage not just with the supply but with the demand for information, as part of broader efforts to strengthen entire knowledge systems in ways that take account of concerns around hegemony.
Increasing support to women's organisations and networks to facilitate empowerment is a growing strategy amongst a range of Northern agencies, with a particular emphasis on Southern women. This article argues that strategies employed by both Northern and Southern women's NGOs to promote the 'empowerment' of women and subvert hegemonic discourses through information-sharing and privileging Southern voices deny the value-laden nature of 'information' and the relative power and universality of dominant gender and development narratives. It will illustrate how these narratives are historically contingent on prevailing power imbalances in social and political spaces and how development discourse and practice tends to privilege both a homogenous Southern narrative as well as a category of Southern woman that simply do not exist.
1. Introduction: Why do NGOs need to negotiate knowledge? p. 1. - 2. What do we mean by evidence-based advocacy? Ideas from NGOs in Malawi p. 17. - 3. What sense does it make? Vocabularies of practice and knowledge creation in a development NGO p. 29. - 4. Legitimacy and knowledge production in NGOs p. 47. - 5. Knowledge and conditional participation of civil society organizations in India's urban governance regime p. 59. - 6. Research for development alternatives: inter-elite relations and grass-roots knowledge in Western Uganda p. 75. - 7. Progress towards effective knowledge sharing in an NGO p. 93. - 8. 'I have not seen a single person use it': NGOs, documentation centres and knowledge brokering in development p. 111. - 9. NGOs and the evidence-based policy agenda p. 129. - 10. Conclusion: negotiating knowledge, evidence, learning and power p. 147
In this conceptual analysis, we set out some of the negotiations and tensions that emerge when we try to build a shared understanding of water (in)security through the dual lenses of a feminist ethics of care and socio-ecological justice. We further reflect on how these theoretical lenses shape our work in practice—how do we actualise them in an international, interdisciplinary partnership? We actively seek to engage all our colleagues in how we understand the function of power and inequality in relation to the distribution of water resources and the ways in which intersectional inequalities shape access to, and availability of, water. We conclude that our international partnership will only add value to our understanding of water (in)security if we are able to identify not just how intersectional inequalities circumscribe differential access to water itself in a range of diverse contexts, but the ways socio-ecological justice and a feminist ethics of care are understood and in turn shape how we work together to achieve greater water security across diverse contexts.
