Published as part of Routledge’s Community Development Research and Practice Series, Knowledge Partnering for Community Development by Robyn Eversole.
Robyn Eversole, author of Knowledge Partnering for Community Development, discusses the theoretical and practical approach of knowledge partnering and its significance in the development process.
Why did this book need to be written?
I’ve been involved in development work for nearly twenty years now, and the truth is you see a lot of good intentions but very few good results. You start to ask why. The one pattern I observed was that most development decisions have missing pieces – they are based on incomplete information. Huge amounts of time, energy and money fail to make things better because the proposed solutions don’t fit the local context, don’t address the real problem, or duplicate something that someone else is already doing.
Usually, someone on the ground could have explained this ahead of time – and even suggested a better approach – but they were never asked.
I wrote this book to give development professionals a theoretical and practical framework for their work with communities. The book explains that successful development initiatives are the ones that draw on multiple forms of knowledge, including local, cultural and experiential knowledges. The book explains why community-level work is not an optional extra but absolutely central to effective development practice.
How is knowledge partnering different than other development approaches?
Knowledge partnering puts people and relationships at the center of any development process. This way of working is not ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’, but based on horizontal relationships. The basic principle is that if you want to catalyze innovative solutions to problems, you need to bring different kinds of knowledge together. Different people and organizations know different things about a problem. Each sees the problem in a different way, and each has a piece of the solution.
