Democratizing Development
Bob Zoellick, the President of the World Bank, made an interesting speech yesterday on democratising the development discourse:
Development knowledge is about political economy and governance and transparency, and it’s about recognizing that all are pertinent and none are “no go areas” for research.
In this new world of policy research, we need healthy skepticism but also hearty innovation.
We need global reach, with local sensitivity.
… Above all, we must look beyond an “elite retail” model of research.
No longer can the model solely be to research a specific issue and write a paper hoping someone will read it. The new model must be “wholesale” and networked. It must increasingly open information and knowledge to others by giving them the tools to do the economic research themselves.
With networked research, all can help collect and share the data that is sorely lacking. We need more core data across countries and time periods on health, education, infrastructure, and gender. We need more and better data on public finance, especially at sub-national levels, which is critical for better governance. We need more hands and minds to confront theory with evidence on major policy issues.
This is the direction that I want the World Bank to take. This is democratizing development economics. This will forever change how we conduct development research.
The Bank is making a start.
Last Spring, we launched an Open Data initiative, making available to the public —- free of charge — more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic, and human development indicators for more than 200 economies, some going back decades. Partnering with Internet search companies such as Google, we are ensuring that data reaches new and diverse audiences, providing more people with more opportunities to share fresh insights.
This is exactly right. We warmly welcome both the attitude of the World Bank towards democratising data, and the steps they are taking towards it.
Talking to donors over the last year about releasing aid data, it is striking how often they want to know exactly who will use the information and for what purpose. They might put this in terms of cost effectiveness (“we should only do the work to make data transparent if there is a convincing use case”) or they might put this in terms of the possibility of mis-use (“If we publish the raw data, people will misunderstand it and draw the wrong conclusions”).
In both cases, their presumption is that they should be able to select and control how the data are used.
In other words, donor agencies are still in the “elite retail” mindset that Zoellick criticizes.
We are pressing the view that donors should not see themselves as the only, or even the main, providers of information to end users; they should make it possible for other organisations to access information and provide it to people who need it. This is a big step for donors because it means they longer have monopoly control over how the information is presented and interpreted.
Only donors can make the data available in an open, comparable format; that is the minimum they should do.
Of course, donors can, if they want, also use this data to tell their own version of the story; but they will be competing for users’ attention with other people using the same data to tell a different story.
We are learning from the world of open data and open government that best practice is that if donors want to tell their own story, anything they publish (eg a website, annual report) should be drawn from the same open data as they are publishing for other people to use. If the donor’s own website is powered by the data they are making publicly available, this will concentrate their mind on ensuring that the data they publish are accurate and up to date.
Zoellick’s speech gets this exactly right:
This needs to be more than just a slogan. This needs to be a fundamentally new way of searching for development solutions, in a networked development architecture, where none dominates and all can play a part.
