It is a popular belief that history often repeats itself, because humans do not to learn from their mistakes. At its core knowledge management (KM) appeals to our ability to understand our failures and successes, share these with others and our ambition to influence the future positively. It also attempts to prevent us from reinventing the wheel and motivates us to channel efforts and resources to true innovations. Unsurprisingly therefore KM has a huge appeal and ranks highly on any “best practices” list.
Of course the theories behind KM are far more complex than this brief introduction, as evidenced by the fact that the concept fails to fall out of fashion and continues to produce no shortage of dedicated blogs, publications and conferences. However its popularity is met by an equal amount of scepticism and critics of its vagueness, intangible results and extensive jargon.
If we strip KM of all its mystique, it is actually a fundamental pillar of international development efforts. In essence internationally funded development initiatives are seldom locally born solutions, they are rather built on transnational policy transfer, namely the attempt to replicate a previously successful solution to a known problem in a new setting. In an ideal scenario they have been assessed on the feasibility of their transferability and their design and implementation customized to match the local context. In a worst case scenario they have been implanted to further foreign policy goals. Interestingly recent studies argue the traditional North – South flow of policy transfer in international development may be shifting towards an increasing South – South dynamic.
Huge efforts have been made to incorporate KM best practices in international development initiatives. It can take many faces, such as data driven knowledge management, communities of practice, IT led KM, lessons learned exercises, M&E, training, or communication strategies to name a few. Due to the nature of their operational context, Humanitarians and Disaster Response professionals have been particularly open to embrace KM. Reliefweb, launched in 2005, is probably the most prominent example.
In practice however most development projects tick the KM box by producing a knowledge product such as a report or publication, where knowledge is captured often in the form of and end of project report, case studies or lessons learnt. To meet their objective however and fulfil the KM cycle these documents need to be disseminated and made available to others in order to inform future planning.
But how accessible and retrievable are they? Many organizations have taken the best practice approach to make publications available on their website. No unique repository however exists to consolidate international development knowledge outputs. Instead we have a puzzle of fragmentation. Visibility is low and retrievability on often rudimentary platforms with reduced search options difficult. Of course international development publications are not alone in this dilemma, government grey literature as a whole has not been overtly successful in thriving in the internet era.
It may be time therefore to return to the basics of KM, where we capture, organise and disseminate the most explicit of knowledge in a usable and accessible way in order to inform future initiatives. There has been sufficient attempts at creating knowledge gateways in the past, but where is the initiative that allows the identification of cross-organization publications by locality, intervention type or target population? Medicine, science and many areas of academia have all been successful in creating standardised sources of international knowledge output – time to learn some lessons.
