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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E30-04. To panel E30.

Title of paper:

Authors:

Njuguna Ng'ethe (University of Nairobi);

Samuel Kiiru (University of Nairobi Central European University).

Short abstract paper:
Public universities are no longer sole champions of knowing. The paper examines other key players and what makes them succeed in the policy-making process. The paper makes a number of suggestions to improve the standing of public universities as one site of public sources of knowing.

Long abstract paper:
Drawing from our knowledge on higher education in Africa, knowledge sites have changed significantly over the last few decades. In particular, public universities are no longer the sole drivers of the what and how is to be known in development policy, even though they alone have a unique claim in the knowing process, by virtue of their public funding and their original development mandates. The outcome of this site and knowledge reconfiguration is that public universities are no longer driving the development policy agenda, as they should be doing. What, then, is the future of public universities-based development policy knowing? Public universities can reclaim the initiative by addressing a number of external tensions. Tensions do exist between and among different players in knowledge production on the one hand, and between knowledge producers and the state, on the other. The tension between the state and public universities is well known. Not so well known are the tensions between Africa-based private and public research think tanks and universities. To resolve these tensions, public universities must address the concerns of the state by relearning and internalizing their development mandates as opposed to paying lip service to them. Furthermore, public universities must learn how to learn from the new knowledge sites as opposed to treating them as interlopers in the chain of development policy knowing. Second, public universities must address internal institutional tensions. These tensions include: the institutional tension between establishing the traditional disciplinary departments/institutes and departments/institutes with multidisciplinary mandates; the institutional mandate tension between ' for development' and 'of development'; the epistemological tension between multidisciplinary knowing and interdisciplinary knowing; the historical tension between the disciplinary knowing and the traditional transdisciplinary nature of policymaking; the career mobility tension between the journal article and the urgent policy brief by the policy makers: the allegiance tension between the institutional academic and the public intellectual; the career tension between the academic need for knowledge attribution and the anonymity of policy inputs; the loyalty but false tension between consulting and academic work which often fails to recognize that a good consultant is often a good academic. To address these tensions public universities must engineer new institutional norms and practices. We recommend that they do this in order to aggressively work their way back into the policy research limelight. The norms include the norm of partnering with and borrowing from other sites in public policy knowing.

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