Norway is part of the hegemonic centre and also located on the periph-ery of a world driven by neoliberal policies. However, Norway is refusing to play the role currently being played by the previous colonial powers.
In their study on The Internationalization of the Academy, Huang et al.
(2014: 18) argue that in the present phase:
In many developed countries, particularly English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, and other Western countries, internationalization of the academic profession is linked to commercial activities that are driven by an entrepreneurial spirit.
The former colonies, for their part, encourage the kind of internation-alisation that Norhed supports. As Huang et al. (2014) put it:
Conversely, in the majority of developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, internationalisation is more affected by academic factors, for example, dispatching faculty members abroad for advanced studies or research as part of the efforts to enhance the quality of their education and research activities.
For Norwegian academic centres, internationalisation is still embedded in strong links between the university sector and the state, not only for funding, but as argued above, for the sake of the public good. This is true at the global level as well as in the sense that internationalisation does not necessarily presuppose a de-linking between the state, higher education and research institutions in the way that the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ of global academic capitalism is pushing for.
Given that for most universities in the LMICs most efforts made in support of internationalisation are about gaining access to the centre, working with more reputable universities, or securing the use of very expensive equipment and laboratories, the Norhed experiment is a unique one. John Higgins writes about South Africa and one of its investments in internationalisation, which has involved building a set of very expensive telescopes to attract the label of global ‘excellence’ to the South (Higgins 2016). While it is true that scientists from all over the world visit the facility, they then take their expertise back home with them. Bhambra et al. (2018: 5) insist that, in the neoliberal con-text, the hegemonic academic centres use internationalisation to perpetuate ‘colonial plunder’ and ‘dispossession’, thus cementing the infrastructure of empire. Dressing the South up in any number of tele-scopes will do little to stop this.
Norhed takes these debates seriously and is committed to prevent-ing the West’s hegemonic influence from continuprevent-ing to dominate. For this reason, in a departure from previous programmes, a decision was taken to locate the ownership of Norhed projects within the academic communities based at universities in the South. Thus, ideally, both the content (or academic substance) of projects and their administration (including financial decision-making) is located in the South.
The general critique of existing forms of academic co-operation has been that theoretical frames and key project concepts are worked
through and presented as parameters within which ‘partners’ in the South have to work.11 This ‘academic dependency’ is often linked to intellectual imperialism that takes several forms, including dependen-cies on: ideas and the media through which they are accessible;
educational technologies; financial aid for research and teaching;
investments in education (Richardson, 2018: 240). This not only repro-duces notions of mental and social inferiority, but also prevents researchers in the South from developing the ability to formulate theo-retical reflections around what are seen as local challenges related to curriculum and research development, what we earlier referred to as
‘black holes’.
One way to break down colonial hegemony is for responsibility for the academic process to shift completely to the South. Equally impor-tant is how crucial this is for (re)learning in the West as well; academics trained in the West need to reflect far more systematically on how our research concerns – and the content of what we teach – relate to the challenges of the South. Moving away from focusing so strongly on British and American literature in our curricula, we must seek links to other cultures of knowledge, to globalise and thus decolonise.
Despite all these inequalities, knowledge gaps, and Western influ-ences, Norhed rests on the idea that university-based knowledge can be shared across cultures, language barriers, political interests and cogni-tive socialisation. If this was not so, the programme would have no meaning as a co-laboratory project (apart from a kind of ‘money transfer’).
Indigenous (local) knowledge presupposes knowledge of the con-texts in which this knowledge has meaning. It is accepted that most academic knowledge has a fairly wide validity, despite its contextual preconditions. Thus, if Norhed’s intentions are acted upon, some of the social barriers to indigenous knowledge becoming part of the global academic knowledge will be broken down. But this might not always be the case. The struggles of many indigenous groups (particularly those suppressed by Western culture) show how tough this battle is, particu-larly when the interests of the global economy are at stake.
In her book, Decolonizing Methodologies, Research and Indigenous People, Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes how indigenous knowledge and
people have been repeatedly sacrificed to the market economy through treatises and other historical agreements and understandings. Smith argues that even when sanctioned by universities, claims to scientific knowledge and the power of truth matter little where powerful forces of globalisation are at play:
Multinational companies have been given transnational free-dom that enables them ultimately to move labour across borders, to foster an intellectual property regime that has few ethical limits, to shape national laws and values at the expense of national identities, and to develop themselves in competition with governments. (Smith 1999: 221)
This logic works in relation to the global North/South dichotomy too.
The battle to have local knowledge recognised as science, and as worthy of further study, is crucial, but even more necessary is for truth-tellers who are attempting to mediate this knowledge to be given space to communicate what they know. This is where internationalisation plays a vital role. The struggles of indigenous groups not only expose the black holes in the Western knowledge systems, they also remind us that academic networks must ensure that internationalisation brings to the centre those usually excluded by disciplinary hegemony and economic dominance. This is what Norhed is doing.
Knowledge can be said to be true when it reaches beyond linguistic or cultural identity and can be agreed upon and accessible to everyone.
Science is not owned by anyone (or not until it is commodified by pat-ents and intellectual property rights). Norhed could not be the programme it is without believing that knowledge can be exchanged across Western and other barriers in line with general acceptance of what constitutes truth. Foregrounding local contextual knowledge does not have to block co-operation nor should it need to reproduce current forms of intellectual and cultural domination. Instead, space for partic-ipation in the academic community needs to be made wider and more open to information and generalisations from a variety of contexts.
Altruism is also part of the story here. Norhed is firmly embedded in Norad’s traditions and development priorities, which Koch and
Weingart classify as ‘Type IV: example Norway’, (2016: 63). Type IV organisations in their system are driven mainly by the values of ‘soli-darity/legitimacy’. By contrast, most other development aid is tied to the strategic interests of competitive states and often seeks to some-how privatise knowledge within the globalised market economy or use knowledge to secure some form of economic or political advantage.
The altruism that has been so important for academic collaboration is under pressure, however, even in Norway, given the growing role of Norwegian economic actors in LMICs (Sverdrup et al. 2012). In Norhed’s upcoming second funding phase, more conflict between the values of competition versus global solidarity can be expected. That is, the ways in which development aid might benefit Norway’s economic actors abroad might have to be publicly debated, despite the huge sup-port in Norway for the SDGs (see below).