Yash Tandon

On 17-18 August, 2000, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) had a brainstorming inaugural workshop on the African Knowledge Network Forum (AKNF) in Addis Ababa. This initiative is part of the larger dynamics of globalization in an environment where “knowledge” is becoming a fashionable agenda of international discourse.  Who could have thought that such an abstract, indeed philosophical, problem would one day become an agenda item in the otherwise deadpan institutions of international economic governance? A similar concern about “knowledge” is now also in the books of the World Bank, UNCTAD and the UNDP.

This is a welcome development. It is welcome for, if nothing else, it is at least an indication that these institutions recognize the centrality of knowledge systems in the present world of the Internet Revolution.  At a deeper level, it is also an expression of some anxiety that the present dominant knowledge paradigms may be inadequate in responding to the challenges of globalization, especially in the countries of the South, and in Africa in particular.

The Limits of Knowledge Discourse

The disconcerting part of such initiatives is that often the inquiry into the present state of knowledge is not broad, or profound, enough to raise fundamental issues of epistemology and ontology.  Part of the ontology of the villager in most parts of Africa is the distance that she has to walk everyday to collect water and firewood in order simply to enable the family to survive.  How does this ontology affect the knowledge of institutions such as the ECA?  All we have seen so far is the received wisdom from the Washington Consensus that if only African countries were to create an enabling environment to attract foreign capital, somehow, miraculously, this foreign capital will bring growth in the economies of Africa and, through a process of “filter down”, the poor villager will, ultimately, see the benefits of growth and have a running water tap in her house and electricity in her kitchen.  But why has this not happened for the last forty and more years since African countries started to get their independence from colonial rule? This is where the bankruptcy of the contemporary knowledge systems is fully exposed in its totalizing and reductionist explanations.

Another disconcerting part of such initiatives is that it begins to focus on the technicalities of communication and information sharing rather than on the fundamental issues of development.  Somehow the medium itself becomes the message, much as Marshall McLuhan had seen it happening in the 1950s and 60s. Every age becomes obsessed with the scientific achievements of its own period. Ours is the age of the Internet. So the Internet, rather than the problems of development on the ground, becomes the main force dictating the agenda of international discourse.  And the question that fascinates the new age thinkers is “how best to use the Internet” to improve communication and networking with one another. Yes, that’s fine, but communication and networking about what?  And for whose benefit?

AKNF’s Challenges

The AKNF workshop had its own share of the above dynamics and preoccupations.  A vigilant women’s group was able to make a critical epistemological input into the discourse by raising fundamental questions about knowledge - by whom and for whose benefit.  But the discourse on the economics of development was couched primarily in terms of the mainstream neo-liberal paradigm.  If Africa has not benefited from globalization so far, this mainstream argument ran, then Africans are themselves to blame.  A litany of African failures – from failure to liberalise the markets more than they have already done, to corruption of leaders – then acquire the place of “theory”, and, forced by the failure of economic theory to explain lack of development, the neo-liberal economists begin to delve into the politics of underdevelopment. Since “economic theory” is assumed to be valid in its own terms, the only explanation for the failure of development must, they argue, be located in either “lack of will” on the part of African politicians or simply “corruption” or “bad governance”.  Like their mentors, the World Bank and the IMF and the various institutions of “learning” in the West, the neo-liberal African economists fall back on an eclectic, disjointed and assorted analysis of a problem that is deep-rooted, systemic and inherent in the global division of labour.

Why is there resistance to paradigmatic changes

There is resistance to face up to the fact that neo-liberal monetarist economics has reached the end of its explanatory competence, let alone prescriptive abilities.  This is recognized in some neo-liberal circles in the West, indeed even within the citadels of the World Bank (see Director’s Comment on “Knowledge and the Washington Consensus”), and we have entered a revisionist phase of neo-liberalism, of which Joseph Stiglitz is a fine example. But, somehow, the African neo-liberal economists have difficult time reconciling to this new reality, and the need to seriously look into the paradigmatic flaws in the designs of contemporary development theory marketed by professors at Harvard, Chicago and the Institute of Development Studies.  The “knowledge” that these institutions market derive their faults not from their location in the West, for after all, many of them have brilliant intellectuals who produce alternative paradigms that do not, in the present climate of the dominance of monetarist economics, see the light of day. No, the problem lies with the reluctance, even resistance, to challenge the received knowledge. Why? Because there is too much at stake.

The American scientist, Thomas Kuhn, explained this phenomenon well in his 1962 classic “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. He said that the problem has its roots in the manner in which education is imparted, reproduced and reconfirmed. Scientists never learn concepts, laws and theories in the abstract, always in the concrete, always in application to a specific problem, in a problem-solving mode.  They don’t ask the para-scientific question – what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate, what epistemological rules lie behind it.  Hence paradigms, models, can exist without agreement on “rules” behind them.  So there is no one set of theory that binds all paradigms together.  When challenged, the defenders try to devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of the old paradigm in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.  These modifications are often tautological.

For example, Newton’s Second Law of motion is based on purely logical arguments that no amount of observation could refute.  In the economists’ paradigm the argument about, for example, the theory of comparative advantages on international trade can get into a tautological loop from which it is impossible to get out with purely empirical evidence.  The same with the argument that it is, ultimately, the corruption of African leaders that hinders the creation of the “right climate” for foreign investors to bring in their capital to Africa “needed” for Africa’s growth.  Linked to this is the question of savings. Neo-liberal economists define “savings” as a residual category after all factor payments have been paid out, including external payments. This definition leaves no room for savings in practically any country in Africa (given their enormous debt burden), and makes a logical mockery of their oft-repeated statement that “Africa has little savings of its own” and hence must depend on capital from outside.  These kinds of tautologies are the final refuge of theorists who cannot explain a misfit between their models and the extant reality on the ground.

The student of economics, taking the argument from Kuhn further, is led to believe that the applications of the theory also constitutes evidence for the theory; he/she takes the authority of the teacher and the text, not the authority of evidence.  He/she does not have an alternative model or the competence to challenge the teacher or thesis supervisor.  When facts do not fit theory it discredits the researcher, not the theory.  Science cannot be discredited unless an alternative is found to replace the theories that are challenged.  “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another,” Kuhn says  “is to reject science itself.  That act reflects not on the paradigm but on the man”.

That is one important reason why old paradigms die hard. There is so much at stake for those who have made their careers and consultancies based on paradigms learnt at Universities and reinforced in career development.  This is the really tragedy of today’s discourse on “knowledge” in the vaunted institutions that certify knowledge as knowledge and discredit any attempts to draw attention to its flaws.  In this context, “peer group reviews” that certify knowledge as publishable in “reputed” journals are deeply conservative, for most peers have a stake in reproducing knowledge that confirms their own, what can only be described as, theoretical prejudices.

The knowledge implications of African Ontology

In this context, it is significant that many Africans are raising the question of “indigenous knowledge”.  President Mbeki of South Africa may have made a faux pas on the issue of the link between AIDS and HIV.  But at the heart of his challenge was the desire to question the received wisdom that all knowledge flows from the North to the South.  His intervention is symbolic of the times we live in.  Had Mbeki chosen the field of political economy, rather than disease and medicine, to challenge the received knowledge of neo-liberal economism, he would have been on a surer footing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the ECA’s initiative to build a network of knowledge-based inquiry into the condition of Africa’s lack of development and persistent poverty is a good initiative.  But as it does so, the African Knowledge Network Forum (AKNF) must avoid the pitfalls of letting the technology (the Internet) decide the agenda of the Network.  AKNF must broaden the debate beyond the limitations of neo-liberal economic paradigm that is coming to the end of its road, and enable African intellectuals to raise the larger epistemological issues about where does knowledge come from, who certifies and authenticates knowledge, and for whose benefit.  This way AKNF would fulfill an important void that currently exists in the contemporary development literature.