Between ambition and approach: towards sustainable knowledge management in development organizations

Over the past forty years, worldwide efforts have been mobilized to address the inequalities that have led to the marginalization and deprivation of billions of people. These efforts have been broached by the sector of development cooperation, which is increasingly recognized as a knowledge-intensive sector. In this article, we critically analyze how knowledge management is perceived and approached within development organizations. We identify a contradiction in terms of the ambition of knowledge management to foster an open networking perspective, versus the approach by which knowledge management is implemented. This approach is characterized by four biases: a management, technology, objectivist, and transfer bias. We argue that as a result of these biases, knowledge management risks becoming counter effective to development purposes, strengthening rather than mitigating power inequalities. We present the concept of situated mutual learning as a promising avenue to overcoming the prevailing contradictions, contributing to more sustainable and effective development interventions. The study is based on seven case studies of development organizations and comprises fifty interviews of practitioners and policy makers actively involved in knowledge management.