By Sibout Nooteboom / Shaping Sustainable Futures conference series
In a world where raw power dominates, countries often find it difficult to govern their internationally embedded value chains from a position of equality. Knowledge diplomacy may help to overcome this difficulty, as experiences from the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) suggest.
What is knowledge diplomacy?
The term ‘knowledge diplomacy’ is increasingly used in my professional practice of development cooperation, referring to the policy-oriented exchange of expertise between officials from different governmental organizations facing shared challenges. This collaboration allows them to align actions for the long-term, even when short-term interests create friction or make information sharing sensitive. Knowledge diplomacy may for example occur between government agencies and levels of government in one country, between governments of different countries, and between governments and non-governmental actors whenever the actors need each other to address shared challenges.
This view on knowledge diplomacy resonates with a definition given in international higher education, focusing on knowledge sharing between countries. Practitioners of knowledge diplomacy act on the side of their primary task while prioritizing personal relationships without compromising their hierarchical loyalties (some become full time professional knowledge diplomats, see below).
Complex challenges require knowledge diplomats to exert influence across organizations spanning public, private, and civil sectors, as well as various branches of industry and policy domains. Despite different short-term interests, these organizations may want to integrate their respective policies to make them more coherent, coordinated, synchronized, aligned, or orchestrated. Global value chains and their ramifications are particularly complex, spanning multiple states, authorities, and societal groups. When the ambition is to leave no one behind, the challenge to align all associated social and environmental policies is immense. The critical questions are: who aligns, adjusts or adapts to whom? And is this process driven by coercion or mutual benefit?
Effective knowledge diplomacy must empower experts and their organizations to create mutual benefit that may manifest itself widely only in the long term. It serves to compensate for inevitable power imbalances, where wealthier organizations can invest more heavily and dominate. For example, a ministry for mining may have more informal power than a ministry for biodiversity affected by mining. On the other hand, great wealth also enables certain practitioners to offer their time and expertise entirely free of charge. Ultimately, the ideal – but unattainable – model of knowledge diplomacy is one that operates free from power dynamics and influences it just by honest knowledge sharing.
The differences with other forms of knowledge exchange
While ‘knowledge diplomacy’ builds on education and institution-building, it is distinct in its purpose: it seeks – without itself using any power – to directly inspire policymaking and foster ownership. It combines knowledge relevant to specific complex political contexts and renders that knowledge politically influential.
The differences to ‘traditional’ diplomacy
Knowledge diplomacy operates within networks of policymakers who are each responsible for a specific societal challenge. They are neither networks of traditional diplomats nor top-down policymaking structures. Like traditional diplomacy, knowledge diplomacy prioritizes strong personal relationships and leadership to enable mutually beneficial interactions. The following characteristics distinguish knowledge diplomacy:
- Substance leads. Knowledge diplomacy is grounded in the context of specific complex development challenges—such as governing global value chains or managing transboundary rivers. Within these contexts, it is uniquely positioned to identify opportunities for early mitigation of future tensions.
- Trust leads. Building trust in intentions and competencies across divides enables the sharing of politically sensitive knowledge to align policy. What appears technocratic and neutral may, in fact, become deeply political—and potentially transformative when applied judiciously.
- Engaging the political sphere. Trust across political organizations enables expert networks to strategically depoliticize and re-politicize the right topics at the right times. This involves exploring shared challenges through analysis rather than political positioning (joint fact-finding), and inviting relevant leadership to consider emerging proposals for formalization. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain in advance.
- The formal follows the informal. Informal networks cannot act in isolation. Cross-cutting policy projects require formalization and dedicated resources. Trust-building has to precede this and runs in parallel. Members of informal networks propose projects as vehicles to deepen their collaboration, extending shared analysis to be more inclusive and transparent
- More whole-of-government. Members of informal networks balance transparency within their hierarchies with openness toward third parties and the public, formalizing their findings and making them widely accessible as soon as possible. By bringing more diverse groups into their thinking, they promote whole-of-government approaches that enable governments to engage more effectively with whole-of-society stakeholders. This includes organizing multi-stakeholder meetings and facilitating forms of deliberative democracy.
Orchestrating alignment. Knowledge diplomacy encompasses both knowledge sharing in complex settings and operating within power-laden contexts. Despite their best efforts, it will not be feasible to include – or even serve – all affected groups equally. Nevertheless, networks of knowledge diplomats de facto orchestrate alignment behind the scenes. When third parties cannot see what happens behind the scenes, alignment may appear to be orchestrated top-down, but in reality top-down networks usually lack the required knowledge and attention span to do that.
Professional knowledge diplomats
For most policymakers who engage in it, knowledge diplomacy is an unofficial, part-time activity conducted on the margins of their official duties. Acting as ‘boundary workers,’ they initiate collaborations without waiting for formal top-down directives. With ‘professional knowledge diplomats’ it is the other way around. Often having an expert background relative to the substantive challenges, they specialize in ‘honest brokering,’ ‘mediation,’ or ‘facilitating peer learning, for example in communities of practice.’ Indeed, it represents a distinct profession dedicated to fostering knowledge diplomacy within fragmented policy networks. They wear two hats: that of a facilitator between parties, and that of representatives for their funders. But which funder is purely altruistic? It is understandable, for instance, when stakeholders in recipient countries view foreign experts sent by wealthier nations with skepticism. What are their true intentions? Is this genuine knowledge diplomacy, or does it serve some partial political interest? What is necessary to ensure knowledge diplomacy truly empowers the receiving country as its only goal? Especially in low-trust societies, this is not evident, and third parties might need to fill that gap.
Environmental assessment to depoliticize
Environmental Assessment (EA) is a legal procedure shaped by a United Nations convention. Most countries mandate EA for public permissions of development projects like infrastructures and industrial investments and for public programs that establish development frameworks for such investments. EA can be mandatory. Such EA tests compliance with national norms and alignment with national policies. Through consultation and participation, it also assesses alignment with public perspectives on sustainable development. EA itself makes no decisions, as those are political matters. Published before politicians decide, it creates early political accountability regarding these impacts and the measures taken to address them. The analysis is separate from the political, and then they are again connected.
EA may be used to more ends than testing compliance with existing rules and goals. It also may serve to improve rules and goals: a pluralist social learning process. There are many examples where EA has been employed to design projects, plans, and programs that enhance development quality in the eyes of diverse stakeholder groups. Most attention is drawn by major projects like large dams that trigger public debate on their necessity, but it also can be directly influential in developing strategies. EAs with the aim of social learning are typically initiated first within informal networks; i.e.: knowledge diplomacy.
Professional knowledge diplomats at the NCEA?
The NCEA’s core mandate is to independently review the quality of environmental assessment reports made under the responsibility of planning authorities and make these review publicly available.. Increasingly, it also functions as a professional knowledge diplomat, enabling partners in other countries to engage in knowledge diplomacy themselves and to use EA as tool for policy process design and social learning. It is made available by the Dutch government based on the idea that offering process support free of charge and without imposing an agenda will indirectly benefit both countries.
Ownership of policy outcomes and their political justifications remains with partner countries. Some of NCEA’s cases foster whole-of-government (and then also whole-of-society) dialogue on critical questions such as: ‘Which economic activities are acceptable, and where?’ or ‘How will we manage revenues from exported resources?’ This process also strengthens governments’ negotiating positions in international investment discussions and on joint international action.
To enable this diplomacy while leaving political ownership fully with partner countries, the NCEA patiently follows the political pace of its partners. It supports knowledge diplomats to convene informally to make a case for a new political momentum. It offers only its time, not funding, and reports to no other actor regarding the substantive choices it makes. Its funding has been secured for 40 consecutive years since 1993. While it broadly aligns with the evolving geographic and thematic focus of Dutch development assistance, in other respects it takes the perspectives of partner countries as point of departure.
There are documented examples from NCEA’s practice where key actors observe that the lessons they learned in knowledge diplomacy have produced ripple effects. These ‘small wins’ may nonetheless accumulate into collaborative governance within the space of possibilities.
Knowledge diplomacy deserves our attention
Most EAs remain focused solely on compliance, and many planning decisions are made without EA altogether. However, knowledge diplomacy does not depend on EA. Many similar structured planning processes offer opportunities to make policies more inclusive and fact-based. Think of standard approaches to spatial planning, landscape approaches, integrated water resources management, or the Dutch delta approach. Any such approach, if it mandates analysis and early transparency, can serve as a platform for knowledge diplomacy. Not all ‘free’ experts have the process skills that make effective professional knowledge diplomats, however. Professional knowledge diplomacy is a self-standing approach and profession that needs more attention. Sharing knowledge is sharing power, and this can be facilitated.
Sibout Nooteboom is reflexive practitioner at Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment and associate researcher at Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Views are personal. Reactions to sibout@proton.me.
At the EADI/IOB Conference, he will present at HP05 – System-Smart Development Cooperation in a Fractured World: Working in the Mess of (G)local Sustainability
Image: by the author
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes