What if there’s a whole world of ‘expertise’ that we simply don’t consider?”

In Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog, Who is an expert?  guest blogger Farida Bena confesses to “hav[ing] many lists of experts on file” and noticing that “it’s usually people from a Northern/Western background, with endless degrees and credentials, most of them English-speaking.”  She asks the pertinent question “What if there’s a whole world of ‘expertise’ that we simply don’t consider?”

Interestingly this comes on the heels of the launch of ReCAP’s “Retaining Rural Access Knowledge of Experienced Rural Transport Sector Experts”  set of short videos, which, if one was to describe rather crassly, is a collection of snippets on different topics from 17 talking heads who were selected on their seniority and probability of either not being around much longer, or losing it even if they were!! A rather depressing thought considering I was one of them!!   Equally depressing was the fact that of the 17 chosen few, 12 were white and 13 were men, 6 were engineers and 5 were economists.  An indictment of the demography of rural transport sector ‘experts’ 30 years ago.

There are some notable pioneers who are not in these videos and should have received some mention even if they did not merit an interview:  Jonathan Dawson and Ian Barwell wrote Roads are not Enough: new perspectives on rural transport planning in developing countries  which brought rural transport into focus and were part of  a great cabal of mainly white men who, sitting in the ILO’s Employment Programme in Geneva and in IT Transport in Ardington overturned the then thinking on transport and advocated for promoting rural access and mobility.  They promoted the concepts of labour-based road construction, intermediate means of transport, integrated accessibility planning, within an overall framework of social justice and equality.  Christina Malmberg Calvo (white, woman, currently Country Manager of the World Bank in Uganda) complemented this analysis with her work on gender and transport, reinforcing the difference in the  transport needs of women and men based on their gendered roles and laying the foundation for subsequent  work o gender and transport  from the early Balancing the Load work of the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD) to the current gender mainstreaming case studies of  ReCAP.

 “What if there’s a whole world of ‘expertise’ that we simply don’t consider?” does not simply apply to the omission of these pioneers’ knowledge from the video series.  More seriously, the series, by editing interviewee contributions to bite size snippets, does not tap into the depth of knowledge that I know many possess.  For instance, one of the talking heads, Camilla Lema was a key actor in the Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project – an early experiment to implement an integrated approach to transport that was the birth place of much of the understanding on rural access and mobility, and the training ground for several rural transport consultants.  Her reflections in hindsight would have been worth capturing for future generations.   Similarly, more detail from other talking heads - Gina Porter’s early work on off-road communities or her work with older people and children, or Paul Starkey’s early work on animal transport, or the work on waterways and livelihoods that I coordinated through IFRTD  - would have helped capture some about-to-become-extinct elements of the epistemological history of rural transport knowledge which  it was the purpose of the series to  archive. 

Interestingly, it should be noted that the rural transport sector has been trying to archive knowledge for decades.  I recall (and I am sure there will be others that I have forgotten) a number of past initiatives such as ILO ASIST Bibliographic Database which still exists and has had an item included as recently as 2017;  the Rural Transport Knowledge Base, which was contracted to TRL by the Africa Rural Travel and Transport Program (RTTP) with funding from DFID and was expected to include the materials prepared for the rural transport training courses that RTTP commissioned TRL to conduct between 1998 and 2001;  TRL’s own knowledge database, Transport Links that fell prey to cost cutting after the institution was privatised;  the Global Transport Knowledge Partnership (gTKP) that was initiated in 2006 and had a very significant section on rural transport; the website of  the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD) which till its collapse included resources on gender and transport, water transport and livelihoods, poverty and transport, transport and health, and the work that revisited the Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project; the stack of knowledge that was amassed by IT Transport which seems to have got misplaced in the company’s transition to Cardno.  To add a live archive to these document based ones was a great idea – it’s a pity it didn’t quite work out. 

I’d like to end by saying that the answer to Bena’s rhetorical question is, yes of course, there is a whole world of expertise that we do not consider, as much, or perhaps even especially, in the rural transport sector. The sector embraces a hierarchy of knowledge that is maintained largely by a hierarchy of ‘experts’ whose demographic profile continues to be dominated by men, many of whom are white, or who have embraced a northern/western framework of thinking.  IFRTD, as a southern-driven network, brought in non-white, non-male, non-engineering perspectives through its ‘networked research’ methodology  where it partnered practitioners with researchers.  This methodology was used in IFRTD’s work on gender and transport, waterways and livelihoods, intermediate means of transport, mobility and health, etc.  But southern-driven networks have a hard time surviving and the rural transport sector has lost that platform to generate more inclusive knowledge and learn from a different world of expertise.

As a sector we should take note of Bena’s admonitions:   to decolonise the knowledge, to move away from the hegemony of the English language and the contingent importance we place on English language journals, publications and presentations, to eliminate the use of jargon and acronyms  or even phrases that exclude the ‘uninitiated’ and to make time to listen to and respect the expertise of our constituencies – the women weavers of the char river islands on the Brahmaputra river who have a clear idea of how the ferries should operate,  the motorcycle taxi drivers in Liberia who understand exactly what transport infrastructure they need, or the women road workers in Nepal who cannot benefit equally as the men from the policy of equal pay for equal work, because they have care responsibilities.