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Preface
Deborah Eade
This Reader is based on a special issue of Development in Practice (Volume 12(3&4) published in August 2002) by guest editors Jethro Pettit and Laura Roper, both of whom have been dedicated to fostering a learning approach to development within the various NGOs and academic institutions in which they have worked.Why should learning be so important to development agencies? One obvious answer is that we should not be wasting our resources on re-inventing the wheel. Of course, every situation is unique, but not to the extent that we cannot draw on our own and others’ experience to inform what we do. To pretend otherwise, in what a former colleague referred to as ‘the fingerprint syndrome’ (1), is also to imply both that development agencies live only in the present, and that they are conceited enough to imagine that they can do it all themselves.
Second, we know that once a person loses the willingness or ability to learn, then senility is probably not far around the corner. Similarly, a development NGO that rests on its laurels or is stuck in its ways is likely to die on its feet, possibly continuing to limp on, but bereft of the energy and originality of its youth. On the other hand, an agency that repeatedly restructures itself in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of the Joneses is more than likely to lose contact with its past, and to end up suffering a form of institutional Alzheimer’s, reliant on others to be the guardian of its memory. To pursue the same metaphor from another direction, while all creatures are born with the capacity to learn, our early years are very much about learning how to learn – not so much in the obvious sense of acquiring the building blocks of knowledge and the skills to use them, but how to tune in to what is relevant, what truly matters to us, while maintaining a sufficiently open mind to question received opinions and assumptions. A development agency also needs to learn how to learn, and to be willing to learn from many different sources, while also having a sure sense of its own values and raison d’être. Undirected change is the organisational equivalent of adolescent experimentation and mood swings, responding to the trivial and the profound with equal intensity. By contrast, learning makes it possible for us to make conscious change as opposed to spouting the latest development discourse, or falling for yet another management fad. The need for change is often recognised in some parts of an organisation, but is also often resisted – hence, presumably, the new breed of ‘change management’ consultants to help guide the process and keep it moving.
Where change that is based on learning takes place, then new knowledge and energy are created, which in turn make deeper transformation and learning possible. And this learning is most likely to happen, as many of the contributors show, in the intersections between different layers or sets of actors right across the development spectrum. It is where diverse communities come together and find ways to interrelate, whether learning new skills or deferring to the other’s greater competence. It is about developing hybrid forms of knowledge and communication, rather than believing that any one player or discipline or culture has a monopoly over the truth, or, in the development context, that ‘development professionals’ necessarily have a deep or sensitive understanding of the complex issues with which they are grappling. International development agencies par excellence ought to be in a privileged position as learning organisations, precisely because they work across different cultural divides and operate in ambiguous multi-stakeholder environments. And since this kind of intersectionality is precisely what characterises Development in Practice, our guest editors found it an ideal forum in which to explore the theoretical and practical questions this poses.
Notes
1 Bridget Walker used this metaphor in her role as a Gender Adviser in Oxfam GB.
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