Crossing borders: development, learning and the North – South divide

Abstract

While the validity of categories like ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World or ‘North’ and ‘South’ has been increasingly questioned, there have been few attempts to consider how learning between North and South might be conceived. Drawing on a range of perspectives from development and postcolonial scholarship, this paper argues for the creative possibility of learning between different contexts. This involves a conceptualisation of learning that is at once ethical and indirect: ethical because it transcends a liberal integration of subaltern knowledge, and indirect because it transcends a rationalist tendency to limit learning to direct knowledge transfer between places perceived as ‘similar’. This challenge requires a consistent interrogation of the epistemic and institutional basis and implications of the North – South divide, and an insistence on developing progressive conceptions of learning.

Notes

I am grateful to Jon Shapiro Anjaria, Tariq Jazeel, Craig Jeffrey, Jenny Robinson and to two anonymous referees for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

¹ I am grateful to Jon Shapiro Anjaria for prompting this.

² See, for example, Hagerstrand's (1968) influential formal and instrumental model of innovation diffusion.

³ Said (1984) gives two examples of ‘travelling theory’—one the travelling of a theory from revolutionary Budapest to Paris and the other of Foucault's theory of power—and argues for the importance of thinking cautiously over whether theories from elsewhere are relevant and how they can be changed for a new setting.