Banking on Knowledge: The Genesis of the Global Development Network

Citation

Stone, D. (2002), "Banking on Knowledge: The Genesis of the Global Development Network", info, Vol. 4 No. 6, pp. 61-61. https://doi.org/10.1108/info.2002.4.6.61.2

Offering commentary on some of the dramatic changes under way at the World Bank, is this anthology of 13 papers from a “business of think tanks” panel at a 1999 conference held in Bonn. They all concerns the GDN, that, as the editor notes in her foreword “is one of history’s largest worldwide non‐governmental enterprises to be aimed at producing a public good that is available from anywhere around the planet …” Papers appear in four parts: the GDN a knowledge for development (its genesis, knowledge infrastructure and the localisation of knowledge, and the instrumentalization of development knowledge); civil society engagement (three case studies – Belarus, India, and Peru); reform and reconstruction (a case study of Cambodian think tanks, post‐communist think tanks, and ways of influencing government policy making); and knowledge across borders (research institutes in SW Asia, globalization and think tanks and policy transfer, and the role of think tanks in the ecology of policy inquiry). The editor (University of Warwick) provides a brief conclusory summation. The individual authors hale from a variety of countries and research or academic homes.