Knowledge Networks

Survival under stress has posed tremendous challenges to a large number of disadvantaged communities and individuals around the world.

How have people surmounted the odds so long? It is the knowledge produced through individual as well as collective experimentation and innovations through which survival strategies have evolved. Unlike the corporate and developed communities which are well networked, the disadvantaged and economically poor but knowledge-rich communities are often isolated from each other, though they do have strong kinship and other networks within a community, a neighborhood or a region.

We have proposed setting up a Knowledge Network which aims at providing this link among creative communities and individuals. If the communities are deprived of even this resource (knowledge), that is, if their knowledge is appropriated without adequately compensating them, not only would they lose their incentive for production and reproduction of this knowledge but society would also lose access to a vibrant laboratory developing low external-input sustainable technologies and institutions.

True, much of this knowledge has grown through social interactions and without any economic incentives in the past. But given the increasing fragmentation of society, immiserization of poor and other stresses, it is unlikely that these processes of knowledge production and reproduction would be able to sustain the communities in future. The knowledge networks have to be reconstituted by the people and their partners in development.

A Knowledge Network approach assumes that future transformation of developmental alternatives for sustainable natural resource management will emerge by networking the large number of decentralized nodes around the world which generate practical solutions to the problem of hunger, poverty and resource degradation. As these nodes are distributed across different institutional settings, regional and cultural contexts, guided by various philosophical and ethical values, building bridges across these nodes will require respect for pluralism inherent in a civil society. This respect will perhaps emanate when we take into account the existing differences in access, assurances and abilities available to different communities as well as formal institutions across North and South.

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