Norhed’s aims are to promote knowledge in the South via capacity building. The term ‘capacity building’ is development jargon; it is what many involved in development have seen as their primary goal over many years. However, for Norhed, capacity building is a knowledge-ori-ented goal that relates specifically to enhancing the capacity of academics.
Although less explicit, but equally embedded in Norhed’s structure, is that behind capacity building is the need to decolonise knowledge, and for this to happen, project ownership must be located in the South.
Thus, instead of delivering or receiving fixed theories, project partners in both the North and the South learn and theorise together, and learn-ing occurs in a mutual and two-way process. This two-way learnlearn-ing might well turn out to be the most important consequence of the pro-gramme as a whole.
Koch and Weingart (2016) show that Western ‘experts’ justify their work in LMICs as ‘knowledge transfer’, implying that local people have no knowledge to begin with. Norhed seeks to diminish the need for these kinds of external ‘experts’ and aims to turn ‘the delusion of
knowledge transfer’ into a two-way exchange. Norhed’s tools for ana-lysing the relationship between politics and knowledge address the same issue. The programme’s basic idea is that, in any country, devel-oping an independent knowledge base is important for development generally. Koch and Weingart show that when external experts prevent the locally situated experts from sharing their knowledge, local systems (in this case, Tanzania and South Africa) are fundamentally under-mined. That is, when local and contextually useful knowledge is side-lined by a need for ‘technical expertise’, scholars at local universi-ties and research institutions, whose knowledge of local realiuniversi-ties could contribute to both better policies and better knowledge, are underuti-lised. As Koch and Weingart (2016: 78) explain:
Framing advice as a technocratic exercise, however, not only disguises the impact of external experts on policy-making and governance in young democracies; it also makes it impossible to hold them to account for consequences of their advice, despite their considerable discursive power in the political realm.
Sheila Jasanoff (2004) usefully analyses the ‘co-production of science and the social order’. This co-production presupposes that most citi-zens believe in the validity of science-based knowledge, and that trust exists between academics and students, and between academics and society outside the academy. Norhed sees this trust as an ideal, maybe even assumes it. However, it is important to understand that trust may not be present or warranted in every context.
As an alternative to co-production acting to reinforce mutually ben-eficial interchanges between knowledge production and society, trust breaks down when academics are (or allow themselves to be) misused for political purposes. In many contexts, the academic profession has become politicised, forming part (sometimes unwittingly) of systems that reproduce Western hegemony and the power of free-market eco-nomics instead of focusing on the excellence and independence of its knowledge production and dissemination. In such situations, rather than co-production, we are facing a process of co-destruction. The relationship between politics and knowledge should function in such a
way that the influence of knowledge, and its ability to produce reliable, independent knowledge, presupposes a certain distance between the universities, the academic profession and other actors in society. When this distance is lost, the lack of academic independence undermines both the academic profession and academic freedom.
Norhed’s capacity-building programme may thus also be an inter-vention in enhancing the relationship between knowledge and society in places where trust in and respect for academic knowledge has simply fallen too low.
Co-production at a societal level may have a long way to go, but co-operation at the micro level can also be crucial for growing inde-pendent academics and strengthening academic voices in society. In a number of contexts, this seems to be Norhed’s role. A key question faced by the programme is to what degree can common (cognitive/
epistemological) ideas about truth exist despite vastly different social conditions and where the political interests involved either don’t believe in the value of research-based knowledge or feel threatened by the independence of the academic profession?
By fostering an independent and theoretically self-aware academic community, Norhed is attempting to empower professional academics to interact with society as a truth-tellers.12 This is idealistic, but worth trying. Trust-building processes must start from below and by enabling academics themselves to strengthen their voices. One may ask, who else if we still want universities? When the goal is truth-telling, how can Norhed funding help to secure academic freedom and institutional autonomy? Unlike so many programmes that are channelling support through state structures to institutional managers, Norhed’s answer has been to focus on the academics, offering them the support they need to serve as independent voices in society.
Thus, Norhed focuses less on universities as organisations, with their mission statements and marketing strategies, and instead seeks to strengthen the academic community and the academic profession.
The basic idea is that the academic profession, as well as the knowledge that academics mediate and try to constantly renew, must regain some social status. In its own view of development, Norhed see value in aca-demics having a voice that other societal actors both value and trust.
Like all other professions, the academic profession depends on trust to be able to secure enough resources and influence to grow; that is, the academic community depends on its ability to make its academic values valued by society.
These values are a precondition for what Norhed asks of the aca-demic community, namely: giving evidence-based advice, and being willing to be responsible to society. For Norhed, academics delivering on these roles is how the academic community gains respect as a knowledge authority, and can be held accountable for its work. This is also how local academics will be able to side-line so-called donor experts, who do not co-produce knowledge with society, yet still they have the right to impose policy templates for which they cannot easily be held responsible.
Norhed also offers academics the rare opportunity to learn about how interconnected the academic profession is, and to experience (despite huge divides) what a cross-national force of solidarity it can be, given the crises linked to global climate change. As Freidson discusses in his work on the sociology of professions, when universities and pro-fessionals confront the powers of the state or capital, they tend to come out as the weaker part. For this reason, he argues that state–capital alliances have transformed the academic profession in their image (Freidson 1994). The resulting weakness of the academic community makes professionalisation across borders a necessary countermove.
In many ways, Norhed projects answer some of the conclusions reached by Koch and Weingart (2016: 344), who, after analysing the failure of experts to transmit knowledge and relevant ideas for develop-ment, thereby undermining weak democracies, argue:
It would probably be more constructive to use the available means to support the knowledge communities in developing countries so that these become able to produce a critical mass of local experts who qualify as producers and critical scrutinisers of expertise. This support does not need to (or should not) be delivered through conventional aid programmes since these are invariably affected by conflicts of interest and accountability pressures that undermine their actual objectives.
In response, calls for a new global academic solidarity have emerged, asking for new thinking about what knowledge is relevant, and how to link this to equitable and environmentally sustainable development.
The UN’s Agenda 2030 also presupposes that, to achieve the SDGs, knowledge inequality must be reduced, and, at the same time, a greater plurality of ‘knowledges’ is allowed to blossom. Agenda 2030 argues, as do Koch and Weingart (2016: 339) that there is ‘no substitute for local knowledge’ when it comes to the kinds of changes we all face at the global level.