In July 2010, DPRN published a paper reflecting on the organisation and development of a future knowledge agenda for global development based on interviews with 17 professors in development studies.
In January 2010, the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) presented a report titled Less Pretension, More Ambition: Development Aid that Makes a Difference, which recommended fundamental changes in the organisation of Dutch development aid. Because the WRR report makes specific recommendations on the knowledge infrastructure for development (e.g. greater investments, coordination and Southern participation), DPRN decided to choose this particular niche in the discussion for the Structure Follows Strategy process in 2010.
Below are the main outcomes of the interviews with the professors in international development.
To what extent should the scientific knowledge agenda be policy-oriented?
Most interviewees are in favour of a more strategic and clearly focussed knowledge agenda for development, but they attach value to scientific autonomy in setting research priorities. They warned against an excessive focus on policy-oriented research. Scientists tend to consider a policy agenda which focuses largely on a few Millennium Development Goals too small a basis for a research agenda.
Research to support economic growth?
Whereas most interviewees sympathised with the view expressed in the WRR report that research should support development as a process of accelerated growth guided by a stable and responsive state, they also made some critical remarks. Several respondents stressed the need for interdisciplinary research into the relationships between economic growth and environmental sustainability, redistribution and institutional processes, state responsiveness and stability, and bottom-up social development. The general view is that there is a need for a less normative outlook, i.e. a perspective that does not necessarily take the Western development model as a starting point. Furthermore, some respondents argued that research is specifically needed on the interlinkages of scales. They consider such a look into the relations between developments at global, regional and local levels as being crucial to an understanding of the development processes.
The need to define major strategic questions
In the eyes of the professors interviewed, Dutch knowledge in various areas of expertise (e.g. agriculture and food production, water, law & justice, health & infectious diseases, civil society, and the 3D approach) could certainly contribute to more specialised development policies, but they stressed that defining major strategic questions should precede this choice of thematic areas. This might result in different thematic and geographic focus areas than those advocated by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR).
The research infrastructure
According to most of the respondents, the Dutch infrastructure for knowledge related to global development should be characterised by coordination in the form of strategic funding of networks by NWO/WOTRO and an aligned knowledge agenda at the various ministries involved in international cooperation. Investing in regional networks in the South and long-term partnerships with Southern research institutes are also important, although there may be a tension between capacity development and academic excellence. Lastly, transdisciplinary initiatives should be strengthened to increase knowledge of context-specific innovations, with more attention for the ways scientific research can best be communicated to other actors.