In their book on The Shock of the Anthropocene, Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016) discuss forms of knowledge that the West has suppressed in past decades, and then go on to describe novel combinations and new kinds of disciplines that are emerging out of ‘there is only one world’
thinking:
The Anthropocene thus requires the substitution of the
‘ungrounded’ humanities of industrial modernity that adven-tures beyond the great separation between environment and society … In the Anthropocene it is impossible to hide the fact that ‘social’ relations are full of biophysical processes, and that the various flows of matter and energy that run through the Earth system at different levels are polarised by socially struc-tured human activities. (2016: 33)
In light of this, the debate about post-colonial knowledge that Norhed has embraced, and is contributing to via different projects, turns into a debate about how the (often poor) copies of colonial disciplines that were replicated in the Southern universities are gradually being trans-formed. Disciplines are changing, and the whole notion of ‘disciplines’
is being challenged because their basic presuppositions are open to question. Now that Western culture is no longer so much praised for its
contributions to ‘the good life’ as it is critiqued for its devastating social and environmental consequences, the time has come for what Ngũgĩ
Wa Thiong’o calls a ‘globalectical imagination’ (2012: 44). This is where Norhed has a major contribution to make. Decolonising the university has to be a global project, spreading from the South to the North, ensuring that we look anew at how disciplines discipline, what they open up and what they limit.6
Regardless of its own intentions, Norhed has no choice but to be involved in this period of heated debates about decolonisation and the need for us all to ‘free our minds’. The debate seems to be about how to de-link established knowledge from Western ‘ownership’, as well as how to build local theory and develop a new academic language while putting global research networks to good use in the interests of this process. However, the discussion is also about the directions of devel-opment. Trust in local knowledge might lead to stronger democracies and economic independence (Koch and Weingart 2016). Thus, the debate about intellectual decolonisation has become a debate about the role of universities and the academic profession in relation to the global economy, academic capitalism and the ever-expanding use of the mar-ket as a tool for the distribution and sale of educational services.
The six different sub-programmes chosen by Norhed as focus areas can be seen as a concretisation of political priorities.7 Reflecting Norad’s own operationalisation of knowledge-needs for development, the focus areas prioritise the basics of health and education, but also make clear the crucial role of the humanities in promoting ethical values at a time when economic imperatives generally take precedence. In other words, the humanities, which are struggling for recognition and support almost everywhere else, have a central role in this programme. In addi-tion, the way Norad constructs these fields of study within the Norhed programme covers most types of disciplines. Norhed is not, as is com-mon in the development speak of our time, giving priority only to the STEM disciplines but rather showing that these are as necessary as narrative, analysis, interpretation and literacies (NAIL) (Higgins 2013).
As such, Norad’s Norhed programme has aligned itself with the basic values that underpin the academic profession.
The idea that economic development should be given priority (and that democracy usually follows economic growth) seems to have less support in Norhed (Norris 2012).8 By contrast, much of the discourse on this in Western policy-making has been shaped by neoliberalism, in which the World Bank has such faith (Balsvik 2016; Norris 2012). But, as one of Norway’s foremost political scientists, Johan Olsen argues:
Reforms of universities have not taken much interest in the university as a democratic training ground for bureaucrats, political leaders, commercial actors, and citizens. Reforms have given priority to putting universities in the service of economic competitiveness and growth, and have largely ignored possible impacts on preparation for the duties of office and public life.
(2007: 20)
It is important to highlight that this does not apply to how Norad shaped Norhed’s focus areas for research and education, or to how the programme works as a whole. Norhed seems to have been shaped by actors who are at odds with much of this kind of thinking. Norhed’s central concern is with the public good.9 This is in line with the con-cerns expressed at the first World Conference on Higher Education, organised by Unesco in 1999. Since then, so-called borderless higher education has been seen as a way of ‘bridging the knowledge gap’ for the sake of the global common good. For some, this offers another pathway to the decolonisation of universities (see Bhambra et al. 2018).
However, this approach is refuted in many parts of the world where universities adhere to neoliberal thinking, claiming to be as colour blind as the market but reproducing and even strengthening colonial knowl-edge hegemony because of how knowlknowl-edge and economics are related:
These imperial projects – past and new – remain central to the financing of higher education in the West. Postcolonial scholars and anti-racist activists have made significant strides in bringing these issues to the fore. However, as numerous activists … argue, the foundations of universities remain unshakeably colonial:
there is as ever, more work to be done. (Bhambra et al. 2018: 6)
To decolonise the mind will require a new global economic order.
Norhed is, however, neither a student-catching machine to guaran-tee the collection of fees or brains (or talent, which is often mistakenly perceived to be a scarce resource), nor is it a way of opening up a market for Norwegian educational services. Of course, the programme can be read as one way of facilitating Norway’s possible future entry into eco-nomic deals in partner countries, but not to a degree that influences the programme’s focus areas or any of its projects’ research interests.
Similarly, no particular curricula are required in the way that the World Bank demands more focus on the study of science, technology, engi-neering and mathematics so as to build a knowledge economy that links into global markets (World Bank 2002). For Norhed, public values rule, and the programme aims to defend public university systems against pressures they face to transform in favour of market forces. As Marginson (2006) shows, these pressures threaten to tear the academic profession apart. Norhed intends to be part of promoting internation-alisation through collaboration, rather than collaborating for the sake of market expansion.10