IKM Working Paper: Literature review of policy-making as discourse

The fifth IKM Emergent Working Paper Policy-making as discourse: a review of recent knowledge-to-policy literature, written by Harry Jones of Research in Policy and Development (RAPID) and published with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), is online from today. It has been published to coincide with the event Knowledge, policy and power held at ODI at the same time.

Multiple knowledges

On 22-23 October, IKM Emergent held a stimulating workshop, hosted by Healthlink Worldwide, to discuss processes of change within the development sector and the Programme’s draft communications strategy.  At this meeting we discussed the key messages of IKM Emergent and their relationship to the Programme’s overall goal.

IKM Emergent’s overall goal remains the improvement of development practice by promoting change in the way development sector actors approach the selection, management and use of knowledge.  In this workshop, we discussed how to achieve this and the detail of the original plans. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Programme seemed to be its focus on multiple knowledges. What are multiple knowledges?

 

Mike Powell defines them as:

 

Multiple knowledges relate to ‘knowledges’ from different disciplines or schools of thought or derived from different learning processes, cultures or world views. They offer a particular challenge for the development sector, given the need to communicate – and often the desire to build consensus – across boundaries of culture, gender, space and status in a historical context of highly unequal power relationships.

Working Group 3 meet for the first time

On 3-4 October, Working Group 3 – Management of knowledge – met for the first time. They discussed plans for this year and put together a workplan for 2008. To continue discussions between the face2face meetings, a blog, the Giraffe, was set up.

Present at the meeting were Julie Ferguson, Simon Hearn, Kingo Mchombu and Sarah Cummings. Peter Ballantyne, an ambassador from Working Group 2, was present on the first day. Ewen Leborgne is currently in Burkina Faso and was unable to attend.

First meeting of Working Group 2

---

Members of the IKM Emergent Working Group 2 – Making the most of information – met on 4 and 5 of June in The Hague to kick start their planned activities.  
 
The group will focus on how information can be better recorded, handled, described and shaped to maximise its potential role in the construction of development knowledge.

Chris Addison and Peter Ballantyne of Euforic joined Dejan Dincic (DiploFoundation), Mike Powell (IKM Emergent) and Olivier Sagna (CODESRIA) to compare views and formulate plans for the coming period. Three main sets of activities are foreseen – generally focused on ‘production information and knowledge’, ‘finding information and knowledge,’ and ‘using information and knowledge.’

On the Euforic website, there are some first short videos about the IKM Emergent Programme which were taken at the time of this meeting. In these videos, Mike Powell introduces the Programme and some members of Working Group 2 describe their expectations.