Motorways may open new farm markets but can also blight rural environments. The gain from new knowledge is matched by new risks of adverse consequences and worries that technology may not be able to deliver its promises. Here is a home truth that previous, more hard- hitting WDRs might have relished. Yet the Bank appears to shy away even from drawing basic distinctions between knowledge and information, even to the point of dropping the word information from the working title of earlier drafts. It is not until near the end that the authors venture the oblique saw that 'information becomes knowledge as it is interpreted and made concrete in light of the individual's understanding of the context'.
Most information is produced in wealthy countries.
Trying to shift it across into a context of poverty very commonly creates absurd mismatches. Much recent research has looked into how people operate within national and local contexts to combine external information with their local experience and resources to produce innovations. Such communities of interest and habit formed the focus of a series of studies sponsored by the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, published earlier this year by OUP as Knowledge Societies. The baseline premise of the report in hand, however, is that breaking down information barriers and pushing through progressive regulation to guarantee access to all, for all, will give voice to the unheard and empower society's poor and excluded. Power relations between those who hold the purse strings and those who do not will still govern how and why the new knowledge is distributed.