10 Ways Academics Can Help Development Practitioners
Development practitioners and development economists have an interesting relationship. We talk about the same things, have many of the same interests, but don’t understand each other well. Practitioners sometimes see us as out of touch with the real world; likewise, we sometimes see practitioners as out of touch (with our brilliant new research). Practitioners need us to evaluate their work. And to move knowledge forward and publish papers, we need practitioners to let us evaluate their work. Tensions often emerge in this artful dance.
I was guided to an excellent post via ACCORD’s Chad Hayward and the Thursday Three by Willem Elbers that suggests 10 ways that academics can be of genuine help to development practitioners. For any academics out there like me who spend a fair of time interfacing with the “boots-on-the-ground” development community, I find these insights quite useful. The 10 roles that Elbers mentions are for us to play the role of
- Inspirer
- Critical Friend
- Story Teller/Praise Singer (love that particular role)
- Connector
- Navigator
- Codifier
- Showing the Big Picture
- Asking the Critical Questions
- Educating Change Agents
- Making Existing Knowledge Accessible (which we often forget)
I encourage you read the full blog post here. But I think we need to pay particular attention to #10. We need to keep our connections to the practitioner world if we want our research and the research of our colleagues to have significant impact. And I am finding that more and more that I find it rewarding not only talk to practitioners about my own work, but to simply act as a trumpet for the excellent research done by others that applies to the particular context of a given practitioner. This requires us to try to stay abreast of the different sub-fields within development economics (environment, education, health, microenterprise, etc.) and perhaps to shift our time a little more toward reading, listening, and learning to communicate well to normal people–probably a step in the right direction for all of us.
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