Knowledge Sharing in Development Agencies:

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Development cooperation has always had knowledge sharing (KS) as a major element of its rationale and activities.
However, the nature, extent and modalities of this knowledge sharing have seen marked change in the past decade, although significant elements of the change remain rhetorical at this point. At the beginning of the 1990s, policy-based lending, linked to structural adjustment, had led the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to shift their emphasis in lending far more to the provision of policy-critical advice based on the huge internal knowledge resources they had developed during the 1980s. However, the language of development cooperation in both multi- and bi-lateral contexts was to see a major shift towards concerns with knowledge-based aid in the second half of the 1990s. Much of the impetus for such change came from outside the agency community. Globalisation came to have
increasing impacts on the economic and political relations between states. The emergence and spread of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) revolutionised the amount of information available to agency staff and partners and the speed and modalities by which it could be transferred. Increasingly, the emphasis in economic analysis shifted to knowledge as the central determinant of economic performance in all regions of the world. By the mid-1990s, a new management literature was emerging on the notion of knowledge management (KM). This was concerned with how enterprises could manage their knowledge resources for better competitiveness and profitability.

Author(s): Kenneth King and Simon McGrath, The World Bank Operations Evaluation Department