ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the importance of local knowledges and highlights the need for disadvantaged communities and other development actors to form relationships that value and respect their different knowledges and logics. It asserts that the coming together of these different knowledges can spark new solutions. In the knowledge partnering approach, working with communities on the ground is not an optional extra: it is central to any serious development effort. As a development methodology, knowledge partnering is based on three core principles: that development is a social process, that everyone's knowledge matters, and that bringing different kinds of knowledge together can catalyze new solutions to development issues. A knowledge partnering process can start with any development actor or group of actors who are concerned about a particular development issue. Development practitioners can use the knowledge partnering approach to manage a number of challenges commonly faced when undertaking development work with local communities.
