ABSTRACT
If only stakeholders in the Global South had the knowledge that we have in the Global North, they too would experience development. The solution to the problems experienced by poor women in particular is therefore simple: provide them with the right dose of information, and empowerment and liberation will follow. Unfortunately, as this book illustrates, it is more complex than this. As we saw in the theoretical analysis in Chapter 2, an inclusive knowledge society presumes that ensuring access is the main concern. There is the additional imperative to maintain a hands-off approach that facilitates the establishment and expansion of locally owned, Southern-based knowledge systems that are not circumscribed by Northern development priorities. We might therefore reasonably expect knowledge brokers to focus on dissemination and improving information access, an approach that privileges the capacity and agency of Southern-based intermediaries and stakeholders to build local knowledge systems on their own terms. As such, this approach is an entirely reasonable one. In turn, we might expect Southern (women’s) NGOs to act as effective knowledge intermediaries on the basis of their rhetoric and perceived capacity. In this role they claim to be both reaching and representing the voices of the marginalised in their own geographical location, and as such there is an expectation that these organisations will be actively engaged in information-production and dissemination strategies that actively build Southern knowledge systems and promote a diversity of issues and voices to ensure a more inclusive knowledge society is in place to promote more gender equitable development. The strategies pursued by GDKS to address perceived information deficits in the Global South and to promote a more inclusive knowledge society are, as the analysis in this book also highlighted, echoed across the informational work of a range of diverse Northern and Southern development stakeholders. Yet, the empirical evidence analysed here suggests that practice falls short of the expectations associated with attempts to actualise knowledge as a key driver of development processes. Instead, what we see in practice, despite the perceived democratising effects of new social media facilitated by the rapid proliferation and uptake of mobile telephony, is the persistence of a narrow set of interests, wherein a limited capacity in fact exists to facilitate or promote locally
owned, Southern knowledge-creation processes that are inclusive of so-called grassroots or marginalised views and voices. Contrary to the myth-making around the capacity of Southern women’s NGOs in particular to challenge dominant paradigms, norms or systems, the work undertaken for this book suggests instead that the responsibility seems to end with information dissemination, underpinned by an intractable neoliberal logic that transfers responsibility to the individual in terms of both accessing and then acting on this increasingly available information. This is not to suggest that these efforts are entirely worthless or to minimise the benefits that some people may experience; rather, it suggests that increased accessibility – whether facilitated through resource centres, new ICTs or the information-production and dissemination practices undertaken by Southern-based women’s NGOs – is likely to benefit only a narrow set of people who have access to a range of other human, financial and social capital to maximise the availability of these resources, reinforcing elite networks and invisibilising those already marginalised even further. Nor is there any space within this narrative, upheld by the network of women’s NGOs under scrutiny in this book, to begin to interrogate the underlying assumption that animates the knowledge society in the first place; namely, the existence of a ‘knowledge gap’ and the capacity of information and/or knowledge, deployed in isolation, to act as a driver for development and social change. The rhetoric of inclusion at the core of the knowledge society is limited in practice by the very mechanisms that purport to create this inclusion. What we have seen instead is the creep of professionalisation, manifested in terms of which ideas count as well as the mechanisms used to disseminate those ideas, where a clear gap exists between those from whom primary data is extracted and those with whom this data is then subsequently discussed, with a range of institutional, knowledge practice and language barriers that preclude inclusion and participation in the knowledge society. In the context of the gender and development discourse and practice under scrutiny here, this exclusion occurs in the form of the professionalisation of the ideas that underpin what gender means in development, as well as the mechanisms by which these ideas are then codified and disseminated, leaving large swathes of women outside of what has become, in the context of the Indian women’s movement at least, a cadre of elite, liberal Indian feminists. This book has shown, both theoretically and empirically, that we need a more nuanced identification and understanding of the nature of inclusion and exclusion in emerging knowledge societies. A polarised duality that negatively pits a hegemonic Western/Northern development knowledge system against a reified indigenous knowledge system is an excessively black and white formulation that bears little resemblance to the fluid reality of these discursive spaces. It also allows us to reflect specifically on the fixed-space representation that underpins this reification, i.e. the unyielding, hegemonic position of dominant knowledge systems. Clearly dialogues can emerge between Northern/Western and so-called indigenous development discourses to create new agentic possibilities
and thus facilitate diverse, locally owned forms of engagement and activism, just as ‘indigenous’ knowledge is meant to lead to new approaches to mainstream development thinking. At issue here is the tendency for a value judgement to be associated with one category over the other; the question is not whether one type of knowledge should or should not be valorised over another. It is, in fact, a far simpler task that demands we question how ideas become valued and operationalised at all, dominant, indigenous or otherwise. So, how do we locate these findings within the broader discursive terrain mapped out in the theoretical analysis in Chapters 2 and 3? We have seen that Northern donors and organisations privilege the capacity of Southern-based information intermediaries to promote development outcomes such as empowerment facilitated through the production and dissemination of information. The efficacy of these knowledge practices are underpinned by closely held assumptions in development discourse and practice that presume a discursive and geographic proximity of Southern-based stakeholders to groups marginalised from dominant development knowledge systems. This belief is encapsulated in the model of ‘participatory’ research communication put forward by Theis et al. (2000) and reproduced as Figure 1.2. Here, this model has been adapted to map how K4D functions as information travels between and beyond GDKS and its users and recipients in New Delhi, India, reflecting the empirical findings in this study (Figure 8.1). As in the original models in Figures 1.1 and 1.2, the solid arrows represent the dissemination of (expert) findings and information, whilst the dashed arrows represent data collection. To this model has been added a third type of dotted arrow, which represents the flow of Southern elite informational priorities that may sporadically inform Northern policy and practice objectives, located within the discursive terrain of development as ‘voices from the Global South’. At one level, Figure 8.1 illustrates that some of the aspirations of the original ‘participatory’ model are functioning as hoped. The participation of Southernbased women and NGOs in the post-Beijing period, acting as both researchers and practitioners, has significantly increased, drawing both discursive and financial attention from Northern donors and NGOs. It further suggests that Southern-based intermediaries are more firmly integrated into the information loops created not just by Northern knowledge brokers but by networks facilitated and supported by a range of Northern development stakeholders. Yet what the model also illustrates is that not only does the one-way, North-South flow of information identified in Figure 1.1 persist, it is also reproduced within the South. Here, the North-South divide is mimicked between the Southern elites who populate GDKS’ mailing list and their own subalterns. As the analysis has highlighted, there persists a tendency for the North to acquire raw data from the South and in turn to process and theorise around it and to return it to the South as expertise, in a process that legitimises the development project and underpins its continued funding. As the empirical analysis here attests, this process appears to be mimicked by women’s NGOs in the Global South with their own subaltern counterparts.
