Where do you stand?

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End of last year I watched the early screening of ‘The land of Blood and Honey‘. This is not a review of the movie you can read the reviews, criticism and more.

What stood out for me though in the movie and more recently in my new role is the question: Where do you stand international community?

We often argue that empowerment will free us from fear and want, which is also enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However when we engage with governments do we really make the provisions that would enable countries to free its citizens from fear and want? Or is it rather fixated on growth, on markets, on investments? A recent statement from Indian Union Minister of State for Women and Child Development, Krishna Tirath,

“Government is mulling over to bring a law under which husband would have to legally pay a definite amount to her wife from his salary and Ministry has started preparing a draft in this regard.”

This highlights the problem with the economic lens we are using in development work. If we resort to economic benefits of development as our primary argument for empowering communities, we pay increasingly little attention to equality, to civil, political, economic and social rights.

Rather, we need to focus on the degrees to which strategies and interventions satisfy the legitimate demands of the people for freedom from fear and want, for a voice in their own societies in a manner they deem fit, and for a life of dignity as opposed to that of an instrumentalist in economic growth. Don’t get me wrong, I don’ t propose we not focus on economics but rather as international development actors we balance it and hopefully tip the scales towards true progress for all.

Culture of sharing: relativistic approach

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Recently I have been tormented by the cultural dimensions of what one considers ‘sharing’. Here, by culture I mean the difference that is due to where we are from, “the beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a particular nation or people”. I intend to distinguish it from organizational culture as I think that is subculture which is a product of many cultures trying to co-exist, while the other is inherent to us as individuals.

The more global in nature our work environment is the more we assume that we learn the culture of the organization but not necessarily pay enough emphasis on the culture of our contexts which is much larger than that of the organization and plays a role in how we interpret and reshape the organizational culture. This is particularly important when we think of sharing and particularly knowledge sharing. In a multi-cultural (global) context this becomes more obvious when we are confronted with people from another culture that we become aware that our patterns of behavior are not universal.

Within this background I think its important to adopt what sociologists use when studying societies, called relativistic approach. For sociologists within the relativistic perspective, diversity, not consensus, is the central fact of social life. People and groups often have competing or conflicting interests rather than shared interests and goals. I think it is important to consider this approach particularly in the context of sharing. Because if you understand how people from one culture share then you can build systems, mechanism, incentives and technology that allows for greater sharing.

Here I am not at all referring to the concepts of cultural preservation, “Cultures are not museum pieces, to be preserved intact at all costs” (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 37). However, what I do think we often miss is the cultural sensitivity to predisposition in sharing of knowledge that are important determinants in both the success and adoption of any systems/processes institutionalized for systematizing knowledge sharing.

As I prod through my own thinking around this and perhaps the contradictions that exist in this thinking I hope to arrive at a place where I am able to articulate ‘how’ I think it can be done as opposed to the challenges currently we face.