Archives
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Learning from the past: impact of information and knowledge management on individuals and organizations over decades
Vol. 16 No. 1 (2021)In this Special Issue, we focus on the legacy and impact of such organizations and their projects and programmes, but also on how other organizations are coping with personnel changes related to current trends. We would also like to explore how individuals and networks, like Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev), act as a pool of knowledge which remains, even when organizations have closed their doors. At the same time, recent articles in this journal have shown how some organizations are struggling to learn from the past and past knowledge (Hankey and Pictet 2019, Schusterman 2019). This Special Issue includes two papers, four case studies and two reflections. Many of these contributions are, in our opinion, unique. They include contributions written by the past Director of an organization which has closed, looking back at the political realities of its closure (Figueres), a development worker who took part in a livestock project in Mozambique, recognizing with hindsight that the project was characterized by epistemic injustice (Boogaard) and also a framework which aims to support knowledge retention in development organizations, based on research in many United Nations (UN) organizations (Sanz and Hovell).
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Online first
These papers will be added to forthcoming issues as they become available.
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The unusual suspect? The private sector in knowledge partnerships for agricultural and rural development
Vol. 15 No. 2 (2020)This Special Issue focuses specifically on contributions on how the private sector, through the design and organization of partnerships that strive to move beyond ?business as usual?, contributes - or fails or struggles to contribute - to transform agricultural and rural development towards the achievement of the SDGs. The contributions to this Special Issue are diverse in terms of geographical location (South East Asia, Europe and Africa, Benin, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda) but also in terms of themes: value chains, knowledge management strategies, research processes, knowledge brokering, institutional spaces, knowledge networks and governance. A number of the contributions to the Special Issue provide examples of how collaboration between the private sector and other actors, including marginalized women and small farmers, can be facilitated and give value to research processes and in terms of scaling up innovations. The contributions attracted and co-developed with the authors include analytical frameworks, typologies of partnerships, benchmarking practices and mapping of the intellectual assets of the private sector. The contributions do not lead to the immediate conclusion that the private sector is a ?magic bullet? in global development. Instead, they lead to the conclusion that the private sector does have a role to play but that this role requires facilitation and brokerage to be effective.
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Challenges and opportunities in measuring knowledge management results and development impact (Part 2)
Vol. 15 No. 1 (2020)From a range of perspectives, the papers in this Special Issue examine the challenges and opportunities in tracking and demonstrating the impact of managing knowledge both inside the walls (in organizations) and outside the walls (in the broader development context). Due to the high number of papers received, they have been divided into two issues, based on their completion dates. The first issue was published in 2019 as Vol. 14, Issue 2.
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Challenges and opportunities in measuring knowledge management results and development impact (Part 1)
Vol. 14 No. 2 (2019)From a range of perspectives, the papers in this Special Issue examine the challenges and opportunities in tracking and demonstrating the impact of managing knowledge both inside the walls (in organizations) and outside the walls (in the broader development context). Due to the high number of papers received, they have been divided into two issues, based on their completion dates. The second issue will be published early in 2020.
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Vol. 14 No. 1 (2019)
This is a non-thematic issue, with articles covering different themes. The first paper presents an action research initiative in capacity development for evaluation and communication, while another one presents the results of a study to consider the suitability of trauma-focused creative arts therapy as an intervention to treat abused children in South Africa. Two papers are concerned with learning in large development organizations, one of which take an historical perspective. The final contribution is the guideline is designed to provide guidance for development organizations who are setting up portals, hubs and websites. .
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Communities of Practice in development: a relic of the past or sign of the future?
Vol. 13 No. 3 (2017)The topic of Communities of Practice and their use, character and potential in a development context has waxed and waned in prominence in discussions amongst development practitioners since its heyday in the mid-late 1990s. The title of this issue reflects a felt need to ascertain whether CoPs as vehicles for knowledge sharing and learning are still relevant, whether understanding of CoPs has changed, what purposes CoPs are serving in the development community today, and how we can know. The different contributions present a variety of reflections on the nature and value of CoPs, and on implementational realities in different institutional settings.
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Open research, open data, and your development organization: information and data management for development
Vol. 13 No. 2 (2017)Data and information management are key components of enabling a knowledge-sharing environment in the development sector. Improved physical and virtual availability, accessibility, and applicability of data and information increases the chances of it reaching intended audiences and providing them with new insights, evidence, or confirmation of assumptions. In this issue of the KM4Dev Journal, "Open research, open data, and your development organization: Best practices in information and data management for development", we present six cases of open access and open data management approaches in diverse institutional settings around the world.
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Knowledge management for development in 2020: let your imagination fly!
Vol. 13 No. 1 (2017)The papers in this issue sketch where KM4Dev is heading as a discipline, and what opportunities and challenges KM4Dev practitioners could be facing in the coming years. The editors found that they converged in emphasising the entrepreneurial nature of KM. The aspects that run through almost all the papers in this issue include the need to think strategically and starting with "why": our mandate as KM4Dev practitioners is to ensure KM activities are integrated into the core business (or organisations) and support their overarching goals. If we don?t do so, our interventions will not be fully appreciated. In the most extreme scenario, our positions will be cut in the next round of cost cutting.
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Disability Inclusive Development Part 2
Vol. 12 No. 2 (2016)This issue explores the role of knowledge and knowledge processes in disability inclusive development. To accommodate a large number of contributions we hope will be of interest to KM4Dev readers, the issue has been divided in two parts. This second part comes at the dawn of a new year and a new administration in the USA where fears are widespread about the potential impact of so-called post-truth policymakingand programmeplanning. This edition includes 8 papers that highlight the enormous variety of knowledge and knowledge processes that are relevant - and indeed essential - to inform such policies and programmes and accomplish this shared imperative.
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Disability Inclusive Development Part 1
Vol. 12 No. 1 (2016)Special Issue on Knowledge for disability inclusive development. Disability inclusive development requires negotiated understanding and synthesis of ?multiple knowledges? (Brown 2011) to address the multiple forms of disadvantage experienced by people with disabilities in diverse settings. To this end, contributors to this special issue share a concern with various ways in which different types of knowledge are recognized, valued and shared by different stakeholders in the development process, to generate new insights and evidence to inform policy and program planning to address disability-related disadvantage in different contexts. The purpose is to enhance understanding of how we can create fertile conditions for insightful learning and meaningful action among all stakeholders concerned with disability and development who have different ways of knowing and experiencing the world.
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Vol. 11 No. 2 (2015)
This non-thematic issue of the journal comprises four papers, two community notes and one case study. Both the first and third papers in this issue represent the outputs of CGIAR research, namely the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) respectively. The second paper explores how reflective adaptive processes (RAPs) facilitate communication in transdisciplinary research, while the fourth one brings together the knowledge and experiences from existing literature and from three cases on mainstreaming. The case study by François-Xavier de Perthuis de Laillevault considers monitoring capacity in the education sector to meet the demands for evidence-based data to meet performance and accountability principles supported by the Open Government partnership. This issue of the journal is dedicated with all respect to the memory of one of authors who very sadly passed away during December 2015.
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Facilitation for development
Vol. 11 No. 1 (2015)"... We do all sorts of things in the name of knowledge management it seems ?except tackle potentially the most productive and lowest hanging of all our fruits, our meetings?? (Cognitive Edge, 2010). In the light of this quote by an experienced group of knowledge management (KM) practitioners, it is no surprise that this special issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal focuses on "facilitation for development", discussing concepts, experiences, and the practices which knowledge management development practitioners use to obtain communication learning, and productivity outcomes for societal development.
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Vol. 10 No. 3 (2014)
This non-thematic issue of the journal includes five papers, two case studies and one community note. The publication of this issue makes the second full year in which the journal has been back on the Open Journal System and is probably at a stronger point than it has ever been in the past with a very committed editorial team and a number of issues in the planning. The papers included are mostly focused on organisational learning, highlighting the failure of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to support organisational learning: ..the kinds of information that did not routinely enter into project reporting were ones that contradicted the project objective? and ?... the information that addresses any side effects on non-project villages ... is simply not used. (Moeko Saito-Jensen and Maya Pasgaard, p. 12)
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Vol. 10 No. 2 (2014)
This issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal focuses on what has happened in Africa in the field of knowledge management for development (KM4D). During the last couple of years, there has been a significant increase in knowledge management interventions in development programmes and a strong engagement of practitioners in Africa, members of the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community, many of whom are working to develop national KM4Dev groups. The articles, in English and French, showcase the implementation of knowledge management in a developing world context, highlighting the successes, the challenges and the potential of investing in strengthening and growing local knowledge management initiatives in Africa. They show how "development is, most of all, the result of the synergy among millions of innovative initiatives people take every day in their local societies, generating new and more effective ways of producing, trading, and managing their resources and their institutions" (Ferreira, 2009: 99).
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Edición Especial en Castellano y Portugués 2014
Vol. 10 No. 1 (2014)Considering the growth in the community of members of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, the community proposed that this issue of the magazine be a special edition in these languages, to favor the dissemination, exchange and reflection of experiences in these two languages, in an open and participatory manner. Practice-based articles are documents that while focusing on practice, have a theoretical basis in the literature of knowledge management and development to which they discuss and contribute. The four articles in this issue use case examples to illustrate reflections with theoretical components, taking into account the theoretical and methodological debates and approaches to knowledge management.
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Facilitating multi-stakeholder processes: balancing internal dynamics and institutional politics
Vol. 9 No. 3 (2013)Volume 9, Issue 3, published in December 2013, focuses on facilitating multi-stakeholder processes within knowledge management for development (KM4D). It builds on the Special Issue published in May 2011 on ?Beyond the conventional boundaries of knowledge management: navigating the emergent pathways of learning and innovation for international development? (Guest Editors: Laurens Klerkx, Laxmi Prasad Pant and Cees Leeuwis) which focused on the links between systems thinking in knowledge management for development (KM4D) and systems thinking in innovation management for development (IM4Dev). One of the conclusions of this Special Issue was that both approaches highlight the importance of having well-established linkages and information flows between different public and private actors, and of broad-based stakeholder collaboration.
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Breaking the boundaries to knowledge integration: society meets science within knowledge management for development
Vol. 9 No. 2 (2013)This Special Issue focuses on knowledge integration. Knowledge integration includes: knowledge production in knowledge institutions outside of the traditional scientific world, such as consultancy firms, think tanks and non-governmental organisations (NGOs); knowledge production by citizens and civic organisations looking to build counter expertise to scientific expertise; joint processes of knowledge integration initiated by non-academia (government, industry, public, NGOs) or scientists; as well as integration of multiple knowledges linked to the perspectives and roles of the various stakeholders: individual knowledge, local specialised knowledge, organisational knowledge and holistic knowledge (Brown 2011).
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Special Issue: Knowledge management and climate change
Vol. 9 No. 1 (2013)This issue presents eight contributions from the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community that highlight methods, practice and experience of climate change and international development knowledge management in sectors including natural resources management, food security, agriculture, community planning, organisational development and adaptation. The geographical scope drawn on is wide, covering experience from Africa, Canada, the Solomon Islands, and programs that span multiple regions from Asia to Latin America. What these contributions have in common is an enthusiasm to share practical lessons of knowledge management approaches that consciously use mixed methods to respond to the atypical and complex challenge presented by climate change.
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Vol. 8 No. 2-3 (2012)
This non-thematic issue contains three papers, one case study, one story, three community notes and one book review. Subjects covered include service delivery in Benin, the educational sector in Pakistan, the knowledge commons, a learning network for the delivery of justice, knowledge networks at UNDP, a KM4Dev field trip and social network analysis, and knowledge integration across boundaries.
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The value of learning: understanding and measuring the impact of knowledge management in international development
Vol. 8 No. 1 (2012)The articles in this Special Issue represent some of the outputs of the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge (KMIC) unConference which took place during May 2011 inWashington, DC, USA. The KMIC was an initiative of the Knowledge-Driven Microenterprise Development (KDMD) Project of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The KMIC has been an important initiative because it has been a concerted effort to gain understanding of what has been happening in the area of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of knowledge management across the development knowledge system. The KMIC cycle has involved a widespread call for cases, peer review of the 47 cases by a group of experts, presentation and review at the unConference and, finally, followup and crystallizing the learning with formal publication in this Special Issue.
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Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference 2011
Vol. 7 No. 3 (2012)This special issue contains a few of the many papers that were presented at the first Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference (IKTC2011) in November 2011, in Windhoek, Namibia. We sought to pursue a critical dialogue about tensions associated with representing and disseminating indigenous knowledge (IK) digitally and involving IK-holders in designing and using technologies compatible with their knowledge systems. These issues concern academics, practitioners and policy-makers who approach the intersection of technology, culture and knowledge from various perspectives, from socioeconomic to technology development. We chose the conference theme, ?Embracing IK Systems in a new Technology Design Paradigm?, to raise awareness of the differences between IK systems and the knowledge systems that underlie technology development.
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La gestion des connaissances pour le développement ? tour d'horizon en terres francophones
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2012)Ceci est le premier numéro francophone duKnowledge Management for DevelopmentJournal. A cette occasion, l?équipe éditoriale en charge n?a pas souhaité proposer unethématique particulière mais plutôt inviter toutes contributions et ainsi offrir un éventailvarié de contributions provenant notamment des membres de la communauté de pra-tique SA-GE, la petite s?ur francophone de Knowledge Management for Development(KM4Dev).